Review: POSSESSOR

Tasya comes out of her latest assignment in a state more wracked than usual. That's saying something. It's the near future or parallel now and she works as a corporate assassin guiding living people through a brain implant connection. Unusual brief, enter, kill, shoot self, pull out. Something about this one was awry. She used a blade instead of a gun and chose suicide by cop rather than self. The debriefing goes smoothly but she's haunted. Perhaps the job is getting to her and a little too deeply. She rushes into her next assignment, keeping a few quirks she's picked up to herself.

She possesses a young man whose girlfriend is the daughter of the boss of a data mining empire. It's an inheritance hit. She has to get Oliver to kill the boss and the girl so the malcontent can step in and be king. This takes prep. A lot of prep but she'll be getting shares in the company as well as a massive payday. Hiding her punchiness she gets into the puppet machine and away we go. What could go wrong?

Brandon Cronenberg's difficult second album sees him stepping only slightly from the brash debut Antiviral. While detractors will make noises demanding he show he can do a rom com with showtunes he presents himself with more confidence and concentration. While the pacing could do with a nip here and a tuck there the central motive is kept front and centre, delivering a solid stun in the closing moments. 

I, for one, enjoy how he's followed the basic push of Cronenberg senior's output. For one, I miss David C. making the kind of movies he used to. This and Antiviral are like a young David Cronenberg who has seen all of Cronenberg's movies, old and new, observed the patterns, refined the lumps and ramped up the darkness (there is some heavily wince-able violence on screen here as well as some surprising nudity and simulated sex). And then they still differ from Brandon's father's work. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch, in fact to read this entire film as a kind of examination of the influence of father over son. 

If the world held the justice it ought to Andrea Riseborough would be a name as revered as Meryl Streep and as well known as Nicole Kidman. Her tough performances allow her to take us through massive stress. Here that includes a strangely eye popping vulnerability. The other side of her play is Christopher Abbott as the possessed gives us a day-to-day stress of one living through a life that feels increasingly wrong. Oh, this is not a drill, what happens in the exploit happens for real. For my part, I'd take this over something like Inception if only for its insistence on the element of empathy, backstory information that doesn't take a seven kilometre walk to get to, and about an afternoon's less running time. Bran-don! Bran-don! Bran-don!