[after dabbing out the sauce bloodstains in his clothes with a detergent pen, contributing writer and tabletop rpg assassin marrrrrrr prefers to unwind by cooking an easy meal for one, grabbing his cuddliest stuffed animal, and popping in a psychological horror in order to feel anything beneath his cold, dark persona hardened by the ruthlessness of the fantasy world. this is Midnight Movies.]
film: Possessor (2020)
food: salmon & avocado ramen
pre-game: sci-fi horror from brandon cronenberg (yup, david’s son) about assassins that take over other people’s bodies to perform their kills. one of the best reviewed films from last year. excited for some good chills too.
post-game: one of the most chilling things about Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror set in 2008 in a slant reality, is how easily and casually the public at large accept intrusions into their privacy and lives. in the world of the film, data mining through web cameras has become an accepted corporate practice. a fleet of workers clock in everyday, strap on a headset, and start cataloguing what curtains or lampshades or kitchenware are being used in the random homes they peer into. often, there are people in view. occasionally, they are even doing intimate things, assuming they are alone. it might seem like a major violation, but is treated by the characters the same way the “here and now” treats data mining from social media companies, or search engines, or dna ancestry companies, or video calls: as something that is wrong in theory, but, as it’s not immediate or even noticeable, not so wrong as to require action.
after all, how (or maybe why) do you object to a parasitic intrusion you don’t even know has taken place?
enter Tasya Vos. Vos (Andrea Riseborough, predictably great, but to be honest, so is everyone here) is an assassin for-hire working for an obscure company looking to expand its influence. her m.o. is this: through the help of some technology surreptitiously planted in a third party’s brain, she straps into a machine, takes over their body, kills her mark, and then commits suicide on the way out.
or, that’s how it’s supposed to go. it seems Vos has had some recent trouble sticking the landing. and despite (or is it because of?) the mission debriefings given by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) — debriefings specifically designed to make sure Vos is still “Vos,” she is experiencing a small identity crisis. this doesn’t stop her from taking on a new mission: the possession of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbot) and the murders of his girlfriend, heiress Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton), and her father John (Sean Bean, alas, marked for death once again) at the behest of Ava’s brother who wants to become the primary and sole inheritor of John’s company (the very same one that data mines through webcams).
this mission does not go according to plan.
one of the best things about Possessor is how it subverts expectations by playing into them, not only with the story (that the Parse job is botched is to be expected, but the how and why and what happens after retain the element of surprise), but also with the camera. Cronenberg (and editor Matthew Hannam) will set up what seems like a standard “discretion” shot (going wide when a character is shot, for example, to minimize the gore), and then, seconds later, show what they were concealing anyway: a trick used to equal effect in a sex scene where the bodies are positioned in such a way that leads the audience to expect (as so many movies do) that genitalia will never be revealed. (incidentally, if you’re bothered by frontal nudity, this isn’t the movie for you.)
the cinematography all-around is great, frankly. the scenes visualizing the initial possession and subsequent mental struggles between Vos and Tate could have come right out of a particularly excellent industrial music video (and do a great job of communicating what’s “happening,” without having to explain it word-for-word to the audience).
to put it plain: Possessor is fantastic, and there’s almost no reason not to recommend it. it’s a movie that’s so thematically rich (most immediately invoked: being, identity, surveillance, capitalism, gender) that it even finds time to gesture at the fourth wall. Vos prepares for her “role” as Tate by observing and mimicking his interactions with Ava, and when she asks, during the initial briefing on the mission, “what’s the narrative,” she might as well be asking “what’s my motivation?”
my only minor quibble is with the ending, which backs off from something a lot messier for something maybe too “tidy.” but it’s hard to argue with the final scene which, through a very specific lack of dialogue, resolves the development of one character, brings significant depth to another, and implicitly asks the audience a sobering question: why (or maybe how) do people invite parasitic intrusions in the first place?
[content warnings for extremely graphic violence, full frontal nudity and flashing lights]
rating: “i’m so cold, let me in your window” -Kate Bush, “Wuthering Heights”
