Despite all the disappointments this year has brought to the film industry, the year has been much kinder to fans of horror and thriller cinema due to a slew of high quality horror and thriller entries. In this context, it’s worth noting that Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, a sci-fi thriller par excellence, is easily one of the best sci-fi films and thrillers of the year. Inventive, complex, and shocking with excellent performances and visuals, Possessor premieres in select theaters and drive-ins this Friday, October 2nd, in ‘Uncut’ form.
In ‘Possessor’, elite corporate assassin Tasna Vos (an excellent Andrea Riseborough of Mandy fame) uses cutting-edge brain-implant technology to inhabit and control others’ minds and bodies and using them to execute high-profile targets. To execute her latest target, she inhabits the mind of Colin Tate (an equally great Christopher Abbott of It Comes at Night and Catch-22) and finds herself struggling for control. Trapped inside his mind, she struggles with the mission and with a mind that may obliterate her own.
Possessor is an engaging, gory, aggressively brain-warping thriller, where we watch Vos manage the practicality of an exceedingly difficult assassination against the unusual sci-fi dynamics of a struggle of wills within a host. What’s most striking about the film’s concept is the near-future plausibility of it all—it’s easy to believe that these sorts of brain-hacking technologies could become a prominent phenomena, and that’s a terrifying realization.
Cronenberg finds admirable ways to convert the more surreal aspects of the plot into cinematic language, successfully layering in surreal visuals and body horror to exhibit the internal transformations and struggles the characters undergo. Fans of Cronenberg’s previous feature Antiviral won’t be surprised that the director lands high-concept sci-fi horror, but Possessor shows that the director is extremely comfortable with surreal and conceptually innovative horror.
Both lead performances are admirably executed, with the leads able to capture and translate emotion throughout even the most heady aspects of the plot. Riseborough’s turn as Vos adeptly shows the character as a stoic (if increasingly unhinged) assassin, struggling with balancing family life while hiding this disturbingly violent side—a living contradiction that contributes towards the character’s difficulties, and one which is well performed.
Abbott also excels in displaying not just a character but a body that contains two struggling characters, both vying for control. He adds both an intensity and a wide emotional range to the struggle for control, and both leads also excel in their ability to make the more complex body-horror aspects of the film believable.
Altogether, Possessor is an innovative sci-fi thriller with intense, well-executed action and body horror, and two top-tier lead performances. Cronenberg (who also penned the script) created a great high-concept film world that’s both engaging and a visual treat (there are some properly unsettling moments of gore, but hey, it’s a film about assassins), and both leads do an excellent job of translating both the characters’ emotional range and the more unusual aspects of their situations in a way audiences can understand and connect with. For fans of high-concept sci-fi thrillers and body horror, this is a definite ‘must-see’.
Catch the ‘Uncut’ version in select theaters and drive-ins starting October 2nd. It opened LA’s genre festival ‘Beyond Fest’ as a special pre-festival event.
