In his second feature film, Cronenberg proves himself to be a confident, economical filmmaker

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: As his name suggests, Possessor director Brandon Cronenberg is indeed the son of revered Canadian genre filmmaker David Cronenberg. Comparisons between the two are not unwarranted. The younger Cronenberg operates in similar thematic veins of body horror, science gone awry and psychological unravelling. But Possessor proves that Brandon has his own distinct approach — one of fearless style, impeccable tonal control and ambitious narrative complexity.

Brandon’s second feature, Possessor, exists within a subtly altered contemporary space. The time and place don’t feel too distant from our own, yet new technological developments are interwoven into this normalcy — developments that have the potential to change life as we know it.

Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is an agent at Trematon, a secretive organization with the ability to implant an agent’s psyche into a separate body and, with proper training and remarkable mental stability, control that body’s thoughts and actions. Trematon makes the big bucks injecting their agents into the bodies of unwitting people, copying their mannerisms and manipulating them into committing murder before forcing them to commit suicide. It’s basically a Minority Report-style “life hack.” Instead of predicting and preventing murderers, Trematon employees create murderers out of the innocent while safeguarding the true perpetrators of these crimes from exposure. In this world, anyone with money can seamlessly get away with murder.

By following Tasya as our protagonist, audiences are immediately attached to a character with a disturbing, morally complicated career. But instead of chastising Tasya’s life choices, Cronenberg opts to explore the weight her choices have on her own psychology, allowing audiences to experience her grief, guilt and confusion in real time. It also doesn’t hurt that Andrea Riseborough infuses Tasya with such depth and gravitas that audiences can’t help but feel her every emotion.

The film opens on Tasya already struggling at her job and weakening mentally. She’s faltering when returning to her true persona at the end of each mission, lapsing into flashbacks of the crimes she commits in her host body and, most concernedly, failing to pull the final trigger and remove her host body from the picture, as though she’d somehow be losing a part of herself in that process. 

Cronenberg artfully encapsulates the complex requirements of Tasya’s job. When one spends days inside another body, experiencing their every sensation from the viscerally intense experiences of sex from within a differently gendered body to the even more extreme sensation of committing a violent murder, it’s only a matter of time before one might crack. Cracking feels like an inevitable eventuality for Trematon employees, as mirrored in Jennifer Jason Leigh’s anxious, twitchy performance as Tasya’s worn-out boss. Even so, the full effect of Tasya’s self-destruction has to be seen to be believed.

All this heady material could feel too complex for a compact science fiction film, but it’s elucidated and amplified by unforgettable visual representations of the bodily transitions. Through a series of striking, sometimes horrific montages all done with practical effects, we clearly see how delicate the melding of two humans would be: the shedding (in some very literal ways) of one’s own being and the building up (again, so literal!) of a new corporeal existence. 

Ultimately, Possessor contains multitudes: challenging performances transcending gender, race and age boundaries, deep questions exploring fate and control, horrifyingly violent murder sequences, stunning practical visual effects and more. It doesn’t always work when an independent film by an up-and-coming director goes this dense and ambitious, but Brandon Cronenberg proves himself to be a confident, economical filmmaker. He drops us into the story without over-explaining the procedure, introduces us to the characters without excess backstory and trusts both his storytelling instincts and his audience to catch on and go along for the ride. 

Though the film’s peculiar, expressionistic style is still working its way slowly through my bloodstream, Possessor could very well join the canon of masterful scientific films: the ones that tell beautiful, meaningful stories about humanity in richly heightened audiovisual universes.

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