Artificial intelligence combines with artificial insemination to produce a prodigy for the assassination industry in the do-your-head-in horror of POSSESSOR.
Like his father, David Cronenberg, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg has a predilection to bodily parts and bodily secretions, especially blood, and parts of POSSESSOR are gorily gratuitous.
POSSESSOR is about elite, corporate assassin Tasya Vos, who operates using brain-implant technology, taking control of other people’s bodies to execute high profile targets. Body hacking in both meanings of the word ensue, with cyber kidnapping stealing one soul to assassinate another.
Bizarrely, Vos is a mother, estranged from her son and husband. No wonder there! Before a reunion with spouse and progeny, Vos has to rehearse appropriate responses, as if she is playing the role of mother, a virtual performance rather than a real life experience.
Disassociation and dislocation escalates after each assignment. In the savagely violent curtain raiser, her mission goes grotesquely askew and her handlers reassess her stability.
Nevertheless, she is assigned another mission, a mind melding gender bending job to eliminate a data wrangling mogul, an inside job that sees her trapped inside a mind that threatens to obliterate her while simultaneously obliterating the target and collateral carnage connected to the contract.
A Rorschach of red, viscous blood, pooling mother and son after mother had bludgeoned the father is a money shot, defining image of POSSESSOR, illustrative of its fabulous imagery.
The film’s design is always interesting; chairs that look like spines, glasses that look like fly eyes. There are metaphor galore, particularity with the concept of parasitism.
Andrea Riseborough, is splendid as Vos, the void vessel of virtual assassination. Christopher Abbott gives good host as the manipulated fall guy cognizant of his “possession” and resolutely trying to purge himself of it.
POSSESSOR may be gross, gory and gratuitous but it’s also provocative and perhaps prescient.