There are two things that make us uniquely us, among all of the other people in the world: Our body, and the consciousness that inhabits that body. So, one reliable source for horror is anything that interferes with either of them. Films about possession or duplication of the body have a storied history in horror because it’s sort of terrifying to think that even these two certainties are ultimately not that certain either. Neither the mind nor the body are sacred.
Normally these are supernatural stories about evil spirits or extraterrestrials, but Possessor - a sharp, brutal, skillfully realized story pivoting around the uncertainty of both mind and body - is about the monolithic forces of greed and power and technology, and how in the pursuits of their own desires, they profane both mind and body.
We open on a young woman who, as calmly as you please, picks up what appears to be a needle-thin fiber optic lead and pushes it into her head. Blood - the first drops of many - wells up from the entry site in lush close-up. She adjusts dials on a small device attached to the lead, and as she does so, her expression shifts from amusement to bewilderment to sorrow. And now here she is at a stylish hotel, dressed in a jumpsuit matching those of other women in an elevator with her. She’s going to be introduced to someone important, though we don’t hear why. She lingers upon leaving the elevator, walks by a buffet, looks over some knives. And now here she is, kissing a man on the cheek before ramming a knife hilt-deep into his neck. More blood everywhere as people run and she mounts the man, stabbing over and over until his shirt and the floor beneath him is red. Her shoes squeak in the blood as she stands. She says “pull me out” and then take s pistol from her purse. She tries to put it in her mouth to shoot herself, but she can’t, she resists, she gags. And then she turns it on the police who have arrived. They gun her down instantly.
Somewhere else, a woman wakes up, a strange machine pulled from her head. Shaken, gasping, and dehydrated, she retches. Now here she is taking some kind of memory test that uses objects from her childhood. The person administering it wants to make sure she’s “clear,” that there is no “false psyche.” That she can distinguish between things that belong to her and things that do not.
The woman is Tasya Vos, and she is a very specific kind of assassin. She works for a company that does jobs for wealthy, powerful entities. With the aid of some kind of brain implant technology, Tasya is able to inhabit the minds of specific people, to hijack their bodies long enough to kill someone close to them, her own consciousness yanked out on the death of the person she inhabits. She observes the “host” beforehand to get an idea of their mannerisms, she works with her boss to develop a narrative for the host’s behavior leading up to the killing, the host is snatched up off the street, anesthetized and implanted. No one is the wiser. They are the perfect crimes.
But as we observe from very early in, Tasya might be starting to show the strain that comes with this kind of work. It’s jarring to be shoved into someone else’s consciousness. It threatens her own identity, her own sense of self, and over time can start to cause brain damage. It’s a delicate balance, and Tasya, as much as she denies it and acts like everything’s fine, is starting to fray around the edges. She’s frail and colorless, almost larval, separated from her husband and son because she feels like she might be a danger to them. She gets tremors, hallucinations, lingering memories of the things she’s done in other people’s bodies. She has to rehearse being herself. Her boss sees Tasya as a protégé and is grooming her to be the new director. But there’s one last job. There’s always one last job. It shouldn’t be a tough one - an insecure, unstable former coke dealer who is marrying up snaps and kills his fiancée and fiancée’s father. That’s the narrative. But as is so often the case with that one last job, things go awry in horrifying fashion.
I usually prefer to discuss films as singular entities, separate from the specific people involved and their other work, but I want to make an exception here. This film was written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son to noted director David Cronenberg, and much like his previous feature film
Antiviral (and much of his father’s early work), this film turns a detached, clinical eye to the effect that technology has on what it means to be human, the ways social structures and social entities appropriate it for their own use, to satisfy their own appetites.
Antiviral concerned itself with the body, celebrity, and the consumption of the products of celebrity. Here the focus is identity, autonomy, and will, and how those things can be subjugated to feed more abstract appetites. In both cases, the interrogation of these ideas is shockingly literal and direct. Something father and son share is a way of…not shattering taboos about the mind and the body, exactly, but sort of disregarding them. This film, like
Antiviral before it (and classic David Cronenberg films like
The Brood,
Videodrome, and
Dead Ringers) doesn’t seem to hold any idea particularly sacred or off-limits, but it also never feels like it’s violating the perceived sanctity of biology and consciousness for the sake of pure shock. The effect in both cases is highly unnerving, and here, given Tasya’s work as an assassin, this film is also intensely violent. It’s not the glib violence of a slasher film, either. Blood gushes and pours and people moan and struggle and suffer and don’t necessarily die right away. It’s messy and unpleasant. You’re supposed to see it for the awful thing it is. And then there’s the body committing the violence, and what happens when the host realizes what’s happening. The mental landscape Tasya inhabits when she’s working is rendered in liquid, nightmarish terms, in selves dissolving, being worn like sagging fleshy masks, awful to look at. Memories get mixed up, experiences get mixed up, people get mixed up.
Much like Antiviral, this is a very skillfully made film of singular vision. The cinematography is as cold and distant as the people inhabiting it (this isn’t really a character study), perpetually overcast days and opulence lit against encroaching dark, the world of the wealthy and powerful depicted alongside monolithic skyscrapers, the corporations that inhabit them, and the identically-uniformed employees who spend their days in the modern equivalent of a salt mine, doing tedious, repetitive work micromanaged to a particulate degree. It’s not the thrust of the film, but again, much like Antiviral, it infects the periphery of the world in which the story takes place. It’s narrative color that describes a world distant from but easily extrapolated from our own. This narrative color is accompanied by a surprisingly vivid cinematic palette as well. The real world is cold and gray and full of sleek, impersonal architecture, but Tasya’s interior world overlays all of that with bright washes of color that indicate memory or stress or conflict, and between the strong use of light and color to describe interior experience and a majority of the effects being practical and thus more tactile (and squirm-inducing as a result), the film has sort of a vintage quality to it without being explicit homage. It feels timeless, like it could as easily be a restoration of something from the 1980s as a modern film - what technology we see doesn’t look especially futuristic, and some of it is downright grungy, kitbashed out of necessity. It’s a world that isn’t ours, but could be, quite easily.
And it’s important to remember that all of it takes place against a backdrop of monolithic, faceless entities jockeying for power. Tasya is an agent of a faceless corporation, used to give someone else leverage over another faceless corporation and in doing so give more leverage to the faceless corporation she works for. There is vast machinery at work here, and though it’s easy to forget about that part as we watch this struggle between these people in this moment, the film does not let you forget, and is in the final analysis as brutal to the idea of mind (and maybe even soul) as it is to the bodies of those unfortunate enough to get in Tasya’s way. It’s as powerful as anything I’ve seen in recent memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment