While unearthing gems or trash champions of yore is fun, i also want to cover more modern films in this rubric, and today we remedy that by reviewing a film that i feel somehow was ignored or put to the sides, more due to its unfortunate release timing than anything else.
I mean, if 2020 didn’t hit the world with a pandemic, maybe this and the Invisible Man remake/reboot would be better known, not that they’re “obscure” or were treated as pariahs by the press.
“This” being Possessor, a sci-fi horrot thriller by Brandon Cronenberg, yes, the son of body horror maestro David Cronenberg, who’s still making movies of varying quality, like the more recent The Shrouds (and the 2022 Crimes Of The Future movie that isn’t actually a remake of his older film of the same name).
The premise is immediatly gripping, set in a cyberpunk-ish future where an assassin, Tasya Vos, carries over her murderous assignment by possessing other people bodies, but finds herself fighting for control of her lastest host body, belonging to a man named Colin, the boyfriend of a wealthy CEO’s daughter, whom is also being forced at his data mining company in a menial role.
I would say it banks highly on his terrifying concept of “remote body hacking” by an assassin, but it doesn’t, it use the original and admittly scary concept to depict a nihilist future, not heavy on outright overstating the world as a cyberpunk one but drawing into the themes of body jacking, mind control, flesh & machine intertwined, and not choosing a victim of the seedy underbelly of society but a fully committed butcher-enabler working actively to further corporate takeovers.
One which happens to wrestle with the mind of someone standing on the lower rung of society, happening to have ties to power but also denied of such, and the script uses perfectly the concept of two minds fighting over control to go into incredibly dark, graphic territory, and to offer some interesting twists, when you might fear most of the conflict taking place deliberately “late” into the movie might affect pacing or tension, also helping flesh out the great characters, masterfully played by Andrea Riseborough (as the assassin) and Christopher Abbott (as Colin),
There’s a great cast, including Sean Bean in a minor role, a quite good Gabrielle Graham in the opening prologue, and Jennifer Jason Leight in a major supporting role as Girder, acting as Tasya’s psychologist, enabler and mentor, almost like a corporate killer’s version of Morpheus, guiding and assisting Tasya when she is plugged in to “mind jack” desposable human cattle useful to the job.
It does remind one of his father’s opus, as it hits similar themese of body horror, man-machine hybridation, dystopic futures, having a similar feeling of glacial detatchment intercut by nightmare visuals, but i mean this as high praise, as it’s honestly terrific stuff, very well written, feeling increasily terryfing without ever attempting to retrostylize the dystopia to 90s standards (for example like Crimes Of The Future 2022 did), as this feels (and is) incredibly modern and bathed in cold, cruel, profound nihilism.
One hell of an ending, too. Which i ain’t gonna spoil.
It’s honestly almost perfect, as in, my only real complain is that it could have been even better, but i can’t put my finger on how precisely, and regardless, it’s good work, at the very, very least.
Putting it another way; it’s really fucking good, in short, and now i’m more than eager to check out Brandon Crononberg first opus, Antiviral, and Infinity Pool, which released in 2023 but i never even heard about until making this review.
Wise Cafe (International) 