Possessor

It’s the near future or an imagined present where a server, who earlier having stuck pins into her head and then twiddled a dial, prepares for work at an expensive corporate do. Dressed in her blue uniform she approaches one of the guests and stabs him viciously to death. The party clears, the cops arrive, the server points a gun to her mouth has second thoughts, points it at the police, who taking no chances gun her down. It’s a visceral opening sequence that guarantees an 18 certificate.

Elsewhere laid out on a table, Tasya Vos (Andrea Risborough) is coming out of a state of physical suspense but demanding mental activity and debriefed by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Lee) to check that her memories intact with no traces of the server’s. You see this was assassination by possession and Vos is the company’s top assassin taking control of people long enough to carry out the mission then dispose of the evidence, we gather usually by suicide.

This plays a heavy toll but Vos is not totally divorced from her own life being married though estranged from husband and son. Her visits are strained; her ‘profession’ making domesticity all but impossible. A tense reunion, a dinner party that she isn’t interested in, then loveless sex tells all. The call comes and she is back on a mission.

The new mission is more involved and closer to the company as they stand to gain from the assassination. The designated person to be possessed is Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) who is dating CEO’s daughter Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton) and the mission is to kill him.

Once in control Vos begins to assert herself in Tate’s mind introducing some ticks, just enough to give the impression that he’s a bit off so that once the deed is done there’s something for the investigators to latch on to. However Tate begins to reassert himself in his consciousness, starting a violent psychological and physical power struggle with Vos, just as the targets are set.

As a follow up to Antiviral Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is solid enough and has quite of a few of the tropes that he used within that; sleek clinical lines, cold characters and an eye for the bizarre. It doesn’t quite have the originality of Antiviral; at its core Possessor having something of an assassin for hire plot albeit a highly sophisticated one with streak of satire on vast corporations and their activities.

However as good as the performances are, they are overpowered by the overall concept and imagery, which may be the point as almost everyone involved has some connection with slick, faceless organisations that have little to no interest in anything other than money and power. It’s brutal and whatever character development there is feels hollow and perfunctory; other than Ava there’s not much sympathy for any of them. Which is fine for Sean Bean’s Parse who is the boorish industrialist CEO, a cameo role which he looks to rather enjoy.

It is nevertheless bold filmmaking with startling imagery laced with extreme violence and Cronenberg gets interesting performances from Risborough and Abbott in very tricky roles as their character’s coils slip around each other for control. If you can stomach the violence then this a film that is worth a repeat watch.

Possessor is on digital platforms from 27 November from Signature Entertainment