CRONENBERG SPECIAL
Brandon Cronenberg’s techno-thriller Possessor is being hailed as the genre film of the year. He sits down with Total Film to turn the gun on himself and pull the sick-trigger on a film so disturbing it would make his dad squirm.
Father David and son Brandon on their classic old and classic new movies.
There are many things worth knowing about Brandon Cronenberg’s sophomore movie Possessor. First and foremost is that it’s violent. Shockingly, sick-makingly violent. The sort of violence that might make you queasy even if you’ve breezed through all the movies by Brandon’s dad, David, whose ’70s shockers Shivers, Rabid and The Brood earned him such nicknames as Baron of Blood and Dave Deprave.
You’ll know if you’re up to it in the first five minutes, when a prologue to the main action sees a woman at some posho event squish an electrode into the back of her skull (check out that sound design) before walking up to a guy in formal attire and stabbing him, not once, not twice, but many, many times. And still the blade plunges down after he’s dead. After, in fact, his neck and chest have been reduced to mincemeat.
“It’s interesting to hear who’s shocked by the film,” says Cronenberg with a chuckle as he chats on Zoom from his home in Toronto. “For instance, you have the Kill List poster on the wall behind you, so you’re familiar with the hammer scene, and [effects and makeup designer] Dan Martin’s work with Ben Wheatley. Some of the shock elements of our film are just from the fact that Dan is incredibly good at what he does, and because you can shoot things when you’re working with someone that talented that you wouldn’t otherwise. We had a probe lens that would let us get about a half-inch away from Dan’s fake heads, and yet these heads held up because he’s that good at what he does.”
The important thing, though, isn’t that Cronenberg had the means to achieve such unblinking violence, but a reason. “The film doesn’t turn away
because Tasya Vos’ relationship with violence is so central to her character,” he insists. “You need to understand what she’s doing and what she’s experiencing to really understand her. You need to be able to get those experiences in ways that evolve with her memories of them: the more brutal, objective versions, and then the stylised, almost fetishistic memories of them that are so central to her character and to the story.”
tasya Vos, played by chameleonic actor Andrea Riseborough, is at the dark heart of Possessor. She’s an assassin hired by a company that deals in contract killing, and she’s able to control the actions of other people via brain-implant technology. The movie doesn’t go too much into the science, because all viewers really need to know/ accept is this: Tasya, in body, lies in a chamber for three days while her mind occupies someone else’s brain, hijacking their lives and steering them to kill whoever needs to be killed. Her latest job is to off John Parse (Sean Bean), the CEO of a data-harvesting conglomerate, and she goes about this by invading Colin (Christopher Abbott), the fiancé of Parse’s daughter, Ava (Tuppence Middleton). It should be the perfect crime, but Tasya is starting to lose her sense of self, while Colin fights back against this interloper. What follows is a suffocating technothriller with themes of identity, gender, privacy, corporate hegemony and existential dread glistening like spilled organs in pools of blood.
“It was conscious in some cases, and in other cases I think the world has disturbingly become more related to the film than I intended it,” says Cronenberg, who first had the idea in 2012, while doing press for his debut movie Antiviral; he realised he’d constructed “a media self” and began to ponder body/brain-snatching and public personas. “The surveillance stuff was very much conscious because the Snowden leaks happened while I was writing it, and I was feeling very angry about the death of privacy through technology, and the degrees to which the government were willing to invade people’s lives. But there are other disturbing aspects of modern society that are more and more relevant. For instance, the influence on the US elections by Russia, and the ways we are all now being affected in our behaviour through just the fact we live in an online society. We are all becoming increasingly hackable because our society is online.”
Of course, it’s impossible to interview Cronenberg without mentioning Cronenberg Sr., especially given the shared DNA of their films: Antiviral posited selling celebrities’ viruses to adoring fans, while the melding of technology and biology in Possessor, along with the Toronto setting and the dodgy corporation Tasya works for (overseen by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who 21 years ago played the lead in David’s eXistenZ) are very much dad’s bag. Cronenberg remains calm and polite when the inevitable question arises, though his level of engagement drops. Clearly he’s answered this query one, or maybe a thousand, too many times.
“I make films from a place that’s honest to my own interests and creative impulses,” he says. “That’s all I can do. That’s how it’s of something of value to me, and those conversations, I think, are best left to other people.”
It’s a fair point given he didn’t see his dad’s films until his own sensibilities were in place, partly because they were not age-appropriate, and partly because… well, what teenager wants to spend their downtime looking at their father’s work? But the worm-ridden apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as becomes clearer still when we see what’s next on his upward trajectory.
“I have two films fairly far along in development, which I’m hoping to shoot back-to-back. One is called Infinity Pool, which is a tourist resort satire with some Ballard influence, and some sci-fi horror elements. The other is a hallucinatory space-horror called Dragon, which is set on a spaceship and is a far-future film.”
Ballard? Is he a fan of his father’s adap of Crash? “I haven’t seen it since the ’90s, so it’s not fresh in my mind.”
Oh well, it was worth a try. Brandon Cronenberg clearly wants his work judged on its own merits, as well he might: Possessor wowed viewers at the Sundance and London film festivals, and now it’s training its sights on you. Don’t fight it. Let it in. Just be sure to go on an empty stomach.
POSSESSOR IS IN CINEMAS 27 NOVEMBER AND ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL 11 JANUARY.