With Caitlin Cronenberg‘s Humane lately hitting theaters, there may be one other off-spring of style legend David Cronenberg with a visionary, sci-fi horror film that’s value revisiting: Brandon Cronenberg with Possessor. Possessor stars Andrea Riseborough as Tasya Vos, an murderer who takes out her targets by means of a futuristic course of involving an implant that allows the consumer to take over one other individual’s physique for a interval of time. The movie additionally stars Christopher Abbott as Colin Tate, the person whose physique Vos inhabits, and Jennifer Jason-Leigh and Sean Bean in respective supporting roles as Vos’s supervisor and Tate’s soon-to-be father-in-law who’s Vos’s subsequent goal.

This is Cronenberg’s second characteristic, following Antiviral a couple of years prior, one other film with roots in horror and sci-fi. Possessor takes the style to a different degree, with sickening VFX work and an bold science fiction narrative that by no means holds again. It isn’t a film for squeamish audiences, however for the sickos on the market, it’s one of the best horror films of this decade to this point. Cronenberg tackles themes of bodily autonomy, id, surveillance, capitalism, and extra with this tight, considerate movie whereas delivering no scarcity of thrills. Possessor is a brilliant, daring characteristic that exhibits us Cronenberg is right here to remain. His follow-up, Infinity Pool, pushed the boundaries but once more and acts as a strong companion piece to this 2020 movie. Possessor was launched at a troublesome time for the business, marred by COVID-19-related closures and restricted enterprise within the theatrical market. Still, it’s a movie that may make a killer impression on anybody who can abdomen it.

Possessor

An agent works for a secretive group that makes use of brain-implant expertise to inhabit different individuals’s our bodies – finally driving them to commit assassinations for high-paying shoppers.

Release Date

October 2, 2020

Director

Brandon Cronenberg

Runtime

103 minutes

Writers

Brandon Cronenberg

‘Possessor’ Deals With Similar Themes to David Cronenberg’s Movies

It is true that Possessor traverses thematic and narrative fields that David Cronenberg’s movies typically circle. David Cronenberg’s filmography is, largely, an examination of the intersections between sexuality, expertise, and violence, and the way the human physique pertains to all three. From Videodrome to eXistenZ and his latest, masterful return to type, Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s body-horror work carved out a style of its personal. Possessor feels very a lot in dialog with that batch of work, however it could be unfair to scale back Brandon Cronenberg’s movie to a hole retread of his father’s work.

With Possessor, which Brandon Cronenberg additionally wrote, he proves his value as each a author and director. Anyone doubting that Possessor has advantage separated from the legacy of this horror household identify would absolutely assume in any other case after the beautiful, brutal, opening sequence. This prologue, with an exhilarating, transient efficiency from Gabrielle Graham, depicts a chilly, relentlessly violent homicide that we be taught is one of the numerous assassinations undertaken in Vos’s work. This exhibits us precisely what we have to know in regards to the methodology of the “possessors,” from the expertise they depend on to what their protocol dictates as soon as the mission is full.

Possessor is an unique idea taken to the acute, and Brandon Cronenberg has the directorial chops to carry this uniquely grim story to life on movie. Cronenberg pulls nice performances from the solid, particularly Abbott, who’s taking part in a twin function of kinds as each Tate and Vos’s identities converge in an more and more surreal vogue. The movie’s visible fashion is drenched in neon colours and stark lighting, and the manufacturing design presents a singular view into instruments of a dystopian future we hope to keep away from.

‘Possessor’ is a Provocative Dystopian Thriller, With Thoughtful Sci-Fi Themes Matched By Brutal Horror Violence

Like many nice works of horror and science-fiction, Possessor doesn’t merely shock your system with thrilling visuals but in addition provokes thematic components that mirror our present world. Cronenberg’s movie largely addresses the ways in which expertise has an more and more detrimental impact on our lives, particularly in phrases of the way it detaches us from our humanity and our identities. Vos’s arc is actually that of a personality who’s seeing her humanity supplanted by her work. She is being skilled by Jason-Leigh’s character to grow to be the proper killing machine, with no familial or private attachments or conscience — nothing however a drive to be as environment friendly as doable.

Related

David Cronenberg & Brandon Cronenberg Have Very Different Takes on Body Horror

Despite each utilizing horror as a storytelling device, Brandon Cronenberg & David Cronenberg have distinct views of what makes the physique terrifying.

Tate’s work is a secular imaginative and prescient of a dystopian workplace job that feels scarily not too distant from our present actuality, as he’s employed at a tech firm the place he, from a VR cubicle, spies on individuals with a view to observe their habits and higher promote client merchandise to them. Tate is marked as candidate for the assassination of his fiancé’s rich CEO father as a result of Tate is a lowly workplace employee in this hellish setting who may moderately be seen as resentful of his place. In a time when knowledge mining and synthetic intelligence proceed to encroach upon our lives in regarding methods, Possessor‘s dystopian, alternate actuality feels uncomfortably near our personal.

The relationships that Vos and Tate have with their jobs depict a reasonably bleak actuality the place work persists by means of each aspect of your life, the place even your workplace setting is digital as a result of human connection isn’t good for the underside line. The finish outcome for our characters is simply as bleak, because it feels as if Possessor posits that this sort of society will both kill you or uninteresting you into being a killer your self. These themes are accentuated and dropped at life with the provocative, express, and brutal imagery that performs out within the type of the movie’s many graphic intercourse scenes and moments of hyper-realistic violence and gore, all of which Vos is solely desensitized to. There are eviscerations, close-range headshots, eyeballs, and enamel being gouged, however it’s all simply one other day on the workplace for Vos.

Possessor is one of the gnarliest movies throughout the physique horror style, however none of the violence is meaningless. It all informs a considerate narrative and fulfills a visionary strategy to horror sci-fi filmmaking undertaken by Brandon Cronenberg. Possessor is a masterful piece of style filmmaking that may go away you awestruck and queasy.

Possessor is accessible to stream on Tubi within the U.S.

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