Possessor
Dir: Brandon Cronenberg (1hr 43mins) (18)
★★★★
With echoes of his father David’s visceral early films, Brandon Cronenberg’s second feature is both an “ingenious” satire of corporate power, and “an ultra-violent sci-fi-horror freak-out that will probably have you hiding your face in your hands”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. In the near future, a secret corporation delivers assassinations by temporarily transplanting the minds of its agents into unwitting hosts. Andrea Riseborough gives a brilliantly nervy performance as Tasya Vos, a senior agent whose work has alienated her from her family and is steadily eroding her sanity. Things spiral out of control when she is asked to invade the body of Colin (Christopher Abbott), a former coke dealer, to kill his fiancée Ava (Tuppence Middleton) and Ava’s tech billionaire father, John Parse (Sean Bean).
It’s unclear how much control Tasya has of her hosts, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph: as Colin, Abbott brilliantly suggests that within him are two psyches “mashing each other up”. This deeply unsettling “juggling act” peaks when he picks a fight with Parse at the mogul’s gaudy mansion, a scene Cronenberg delivers with the “suave assurance” of a Christopher Nolan set piece. The film is fabulously stylish, said Mark Kermode in The Observer, with its “brooding” soundtrack, eerie cinematography, and narrative like a “half-remembered dream, full of ellipses, open-ended questions and violent eruptions”. It’s also doubtless too “gleefully gory” for some, with melting faces, stabbed throats and so on, made all the more horrifyingly tactile by the director’s use of “prosthetics and practical effects rather than post-hoc computer graphics”. Available on
Apple, Sky and Amazon.