BFI London Film Festival 2020: Possessor
Being the son of one of the de facto leaders of the body horror genre, Brandon Cronenberg was always going to be associated with the intense gore and terror prominent in his father’s films. His first film, Antiviral, featured injections, skin grafts, and celebrity meat markets. His second feature, Possessor, fully embraces the grisly, unsettling horror of its body-swapping premise, while showcasing the very best of lead actors Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott’s talents.
From the opening sequence—eerily quiet and other-wordly as Gabrielle Graham’s hostess Holly connects to a strange machine before committing a seemingly unprovoked murder—Possessor has the ability to make its audience feel desperate to look away, but somehow wholly unable to. As we soon find out, Riseborough’s Tasya Vos is a ‘possessor’, a highly-qualified assassin who implants her consciousness into other’s bodies to carry out killings, including Holly’s. The next job she is required to carry out will be her biggest: implanting in the body of Abbott’s Colin Tate, Tasya must assassinate data mining magnate John Parse (Sean Bean), whose company Colin works at, as well as Colin’s girlfriend and John’s daughter, Ava (Tuppence Middleton). The film hits its stride once Colin and Tasya’s consciousnesses have collided, with Abbott giving a chilling performance that becomes more and more impressive as the lines between the two characters’ minds become ever-blurred.
As Tasya struggles to regain control inside Colin’s mind, Cronenberg somehow accesses an invisible space between both bodies, using unsettling montage sequences and an overwhelming haptic viscerality—the director is clearly having fun with the elements of body horror and seemingly blood-drenched colour palette on display. Throughout the film, a feeling of unease pulses, permeating even the most mundane of shots: a cat walking along a table, a young boy playing with a creepy toy. Tasya shouts “pull me out!” before leaving the corporeal body she’s inhabited, but we soon realise the attachment between herself and Colin is too strong, and we’re dragged into this inexplicable space with them. There are several scenes of graphic sex and violence, but the film is at its best when it explores the relationship between Colin and Tasya, as they communicate with each other whilst occupying the same body and seemingly, at times, the same consciousness. The violence avoids gratuitousness, though; while a lot of blood is spilled, Cronenberg uses it to explore Tasya’s descent into supposed psychopathy, her exact mental state never really clear.
Other standouts include Jessica Jason Leigh as Tasya’s employer Girder, playing a similar character to her terminally ill scientist Ventress in Annihilation, her monotonous, stoic nature intensifying the unease of the film. Riseborough advances on her work as a similarly terrifying (but unwitting) murderer in Black Mirror’s Season 4 episode Crocodile; but it’s Abbott’s powerhouse performance of Colin that sticks. Never unconvincing in his portrayal of someone straddling the lines of two disparate identities—in moments such as when he screams “I’m a giant!” as he attacks Parse, or later as he assassinates him, it’s delightfully unclear whether we’re viewing Tasya or Colin—his nervous, unpredictable state is exhilarating to watch. While the film wouldn’t suffer from a shorter runtime, it’s a completely absorbing, disturbing watch, visceral in every sense of the word.
