Possessor Uncut: Brandon Cronenberg messes with our heads with a provocative tale of body-snatching assassins
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
It seems too easy to draw a straight line between the work of Brandon Cronenberg and his national-treasure dad David. But if I were trying to distance my own work, I’d probably want to avoid body-horror.
On the other hand, whatever works. And there’s a lot that impresses in the brutal Possessor Uncut, the younger Cronenberg’s dreamlike tale of a hit-woman named Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), whose modus-operandi is to have her consciousness digitally placed in the body of a dupe that does the killing.
Andrea Riseborough is an assassin who works from inside people’s heads in Possessor Uncut
Possessor Uncut opens at a pace that’s frankly higher-charged than the rest of the movie. We see a young African-American woman looking at herself strangely in the mirror and adjusting a device on her head. She then goes on to commit a gruesome murder at a party, trying unsuccessfully to shoot herself, before committing “suicide by police.”
Cue the lab, where Tasya is awakened in her own body and being attended to by Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her technician/minder. This “hit” didn’t go entirely according to plan, and Girder will spend much of the rest of the movie worrying about whether her prize pupil is losing it (or herself).
Cronenberg is not one to sweat details, and there’s much in Possessor Uncut that goes unexplained or remains ambiguous. We don’t really see the nuts and bolts of how one consciousness supplants another, but it seems to be remote.
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In any case, after some uneasy R&R with her clueless husband (Rossif Sutherland) and son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot), Tasya signs back to duty. Anyone in charge of a secret organization doing high-tech killings for giant corporations should be paying close attention to the mental state of its operatives. And Tasya, at this point, seems too shaky to drive a car let alone drive another person’s body.
And this is where the wheels come off for her. She’s implanted in a person already capable of murder, the cocaine-dealing fiance (Christopher Abbott) of the daughter (Tuppence Middleton) of a high-profile CEO (Sean Bean). The latter is the target. But at this point personalities merge, and we’re not quite sure who the murderous entity is.
If the movie isn’t exactly expositional, it does communicate hauntingly with its images and ’s trippy cinematography from Karim Hussain. It’s not every movie that asks you to depict consciousness, and to that end, Possessor Uncut is arty and engrossing.
The same can’t be said for the characters, who aren’t exactly fleshed out, and only display high emotion when they’re stabbing people. The events of the last act are profoundly deranged, like something out of a classic Greek tragedy. But don’t look for anybody to rend garments or shout at the gods. There’s an all-too-Canadian tone of melancholy, where people practically sleepwalk through high-intensity events. It is emotionally cold.
That said, it is a cleverly written denouement. There may be a lot of questions unanswered in Possessor, but there’s feverish imagination at work.
Possessor Uncut. Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. Starring Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Opens in theatres, Friday, October 2.