Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Possessor’ on VOD, a Far-Beyond-Gory Psychosexual Horror Film by Director Brandon Cronenberg

Here’s the apple and here’s the tree, and unless the latter is at the top of a steep incline, the former will not fall far. Case in point, Possessor, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, and now streaming on VOD. The elder Cronenberg is of course infamous and influential for familiarizing much of the world with squirm-inducing body-horror cinema, and it makes sense that his offspring follows suit. Which is a way of saying watch out — the film is technically titled Possessor Uncut for a reason, namely, because it may test your stomach’s ability to retain its contents.

POSSESSOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Holly (Gabrielle Graham) feels for the spot between her cornrows. She pushes a pin into a hole in her skull. Blood bubbles up. Tears run down her face. She attends a party. Picks up a knife. Clears the room when she jams it into a man’s neck. “Pull me out,” she says to no visible person. A pistol. She puts it in her mouth. Can’t pull the trigger. Cops burst in. She points the pistol at them. They gun her down. Dead.

She wakes up beneath bizarre machinery. Now she’s Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough). She immediately throws up. Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), which may be a name or may be a title, I’m not sure, holds the bucket. Tasya takes a memory test by identifying artifacts from her life. There were “anomalies during interface,” she reports to Girder. But she’s OK with taking the next contract. The organization will kidnap Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) and put an implant in his brain so Tasya can psychically occupy his body. He’s dating Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton), the daughter of billionaire John Parse (Sean Bean), who owns a data-mining tech operation called Zoothroo. John Parse’s brother wants John and Ava dead so he can take the company and fortune. John Parse gave Colin a cruddy entry-level job at Zoothroo, and treats him terribly. It’ll look like a murder-suicide. The perfect crime.

Tasya has a husband, Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and a young son, Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). They’re mostly estranged, but she visits them for the night. When she and Michael have sex, her face is blank and her mind pictures the scene from her last murder in which the knife penetrates her victim’s neck. Soon thereafter, she inhabits Colin. Awakens, inspects her male body in the mirror. Goes to his job, which involves wearing VR goggles and spying on people via their computer webcams. Colin/Tasya experiences odd stabs of pain, sees glitch-in-the-matrix floating globules, looks in the mirror and sees warped versions of him/herself. She doesn’t report the issues to Girder. Yet she still continues with the mission. Is it compulsion? Curiosity? Or a desire to escape her life’s torment fueling these decisions?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Leigh and the futuro-bio-tech concept bring to mind Papa Cronenberg’s underrated eXistenZ (which, notably, has the most 1999 spelling of any movie from 1999). Possessor also has some Kubrickian sci-fi strangeness (2001, A Clockwork Orange), Nicolas Winding Refn surreal-fetishy flourishes (The Neon Demon) and disturbing identity-crisis visuals a la Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

Performance Worth Watching: Abbott — who was extraordinary in overlooked 2015 character drama James White — gives a strong nonverbal performance, playing a woman quite literally trapped inside a man’s body.

Memorable Dialogue: “You seem so deformed these days,” Ava says to Colin, possibly subconsciously noticing that a woman assassin is occupying her boyfriend’s brain

Sex and Skin: There’s enough graphic nudity and sex here to justify the not-rated non-rating.

Our Take: Come for the strange retro-futurist dystopian sci-fi, stay for the unsettling psychosexual murder-fornication transgender-combat subtext, I always say. I’m not sure Brandon Cronenberg ever fully fleshes out Tasya or Colin, but glooped together into a horrible terrifying melty-faced amalgam in-betweener person, they’re a single fascinating character construct, two halves of a primal, grotesque whole. Both Colin and Tasya use technology to invade privacy, although hers is more ontological and his is more alarmingly realistic. And we soon wonder who’s the dominant force inside that skull, who’s really pulling the levers and flipping the switches.

So in a sense, Possessor is about control: The rich controlling society, society controlling the individual, corporations controlling their employees, the opaque void of the universe controlling everything. The film has no shortage of ideas; in fact, it’s positively bursting with them. The pain and pleasure of invasive penetration; mechanisms of civilization and the human animal; analog and virtual realities; how identity is tied to the gender spectrum. Cronenberg deploys all manner of upsetting imagery, from outlandish violence to nightmarish abstractions inspired by experimental films.

The film is at once intellectual and deeply primordial, an unblinking observation of core existential terrors. Human emotion is for other movies — many, many other movies — to explore and evaluate. This movie shies not away from the trauma inflicted upon the human body by instruments sharp and blunt, studying the primitive art of murder in long, unblinking closeups with gruesome practical effects. Existence is chaos; now here’s a movie made with controlled precision illuminating this unpleasant truth. Enjoy it. Or don’t.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Possessor is cold, nasty, brutal, extreme and provocative — so much so, you may find yourself unable to tear your eyes away. Maybe it’s profound; maybe it’s provocation for its own sake, an exercise in repulsion-as-art. Either way, it’s definitely not for everyone.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Possessor