If there's anything I love more in a movie than weird Sci-Fi and ultraviolence I've yet to find it. I'm not even talking about the high-budget, high concept, time bending rigmarole of basically everything Christopher Nolan has filmed ever (although I do love all of his movies that I've seen, let's be fair) but there's something about a low-key indie flick flying under the radar and pooping up on a streaming service with nought but an impenetrable trailer and an endorsement from a movie magazine you've never heard of. Sometimes you get burned and sit through an hour and a half of pretentious tripe that meanders to a conclusion so unsatisfactory it makes Eraserhead look like a well crafted spy thriller.
Ok, I'm derailing myself a little here but I feel like this needs saying (again maybe? I tend to go on a bit, right?); David Lynch fans - I'm sorry. Most of his output is dross and everyone just fawns over it because he's embraced how absolutely batshit crazy he is and it makes you feel special and edgy. It's ok. He made Dune and even though it was critically panned and nothing like the books at least it made some sort of sense. Eraserhead is bollocks. Most of his movies are bollocks. Don't come at me with "you just don't get it man" you filthy hippies; they're deliberately incomprehensible so neither do you, I'm just not pretending so I look cool in front of my mates. I do other stuff to pretend I'm cool in front of the friends I pretend I have. Fight me you cowards.
Anyway, such digressions not-withstanding, I was fortunate enough to happen across a movie that slaked my thirst not only for weird Sci-Fi but also gut-wrenching violence. In the very red corner, wearing the very red-spattered trunks, fighting out of somewhere in Canada (I think): Possessor!
Let's set the scene in case anyone isn't very aware up-front about what they're about to get. This is the latest effort from Brandon Cronenburg, who is indeed the offspring of "I like to gross people out in the stickiest way possible" David Cronenburg and appears to have inherited his father's fabled penchant for making film sets messy and unsettling. Once you know this, you can draw parallels across a number of their movies and this is no bad thing.
Possessor is one of those movies that has a very simple set up which is actually so preposterously complex if you really look at it that it shouldn't work. There are no specifics laid out about how or why any of the technology works, when this is set or how it all came to be; it exists and we are invited to accept that fact, shut our face flaps and absorb the madness as it rolls gorily out in front of us. The idea of assassins psychically commandeering a completely innocent person for the purposes of alibi free murdering is pretty straightforward, but the implications are far-reaching and hyper-problematic. Especially if, as happens here, something goes wrong and said assassin can't extract themselves in time and there are two consciousnesses rattling around inside one increasingly confused body. No spoilers, but it doesn't work out well for basically anybody.
The opening scene lets you know in no uncertain terms what world we're about to inhabit for the next 104 minutes; a women inserting a needle into her brain and twiddling with the device it's attached to until she's weeping before she merrily trots off to her job, meets up with her co-workers then savagely mutilates her boss about the face (and just about everywhere else)with a standard dining knife, before randomly failing to shoot herself in the face and eventually dying in a hail of standard issue Police ammunition. I don't know if it's a direct political statement that she gets shot in the face once she's clearly already dead or just an excuse to pump another quart of crimson corn syrup all over the actress' face. This is not a porno, honest (although later on you might be forgive for thinking that, but more on that as we get to it).
Andrea Risborough is fast becoming the go-to actress for this sort of stuff; she was great in Mandy and got high praise for her outing in Black Mirror (which is also bollocks in my vastly over-bloated and self-aggrandised opinion, but not as bad as Lynch's stuff so it can have a pass for now) and she is great here again as the assassin, Voss. It is a neat trick to balance the type of grim and visceral bloodshed on show here with what is essentially a psychological thriller and family drama, but balanced it is. Above all, Voss is human and that remains the central dilemma of the plot: can Voss maintain her mental health in the face of having to inhabit these various people to commit these terrible crimes as well as fix her broken family unit? A few stabbings later and it shifts to whether she can even survive at all and return from the host she's been stuck in and before the end everything has gone completely tits up and the question really becomes can anybody walk out of this without their internal organs being turned into external ones? Seriously though, Cronenburg family traditions are well and truly alive when it comes to spilling the claret and showing every goddamned detail in glorious close up. Don't watch it over a Bolognese dinner, that's all I'm saying. Thank me later.
Fair warning, this one does burn slow. It has that Videodrone feel, where it crawls to the end making you really take in every moment and ponder it for the next few scenes until the next horror gushes arterially from stage left. It's not for everyone pacing wise, and I can imagine it not being action-driven enough for a lot of audiences. You guys are better than that though (I assume, why else would you be here after all?) and there are some very odd things to work through. The possession process graphics are an unsettling mix of Ghost in the Shell and the end of Raider of the Lost Ark; the story's main host's day job appears to be using spy cameras to identify peoples curtains in excruciating detail, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write, and I may have missed the explanation for it somewhere along the line. There are a couple of weird semi-hallucinatory sex scenes thrown in for good measure and word to the wise, semi is not applicable to other things in shot. Not that I necessarily have a problem with cocks, it's just that at least one of them is a surprise cock and nobody wants one of those I reckon.
I might have to have another watch if I'm honest (not for the cocks, you degenerates) to really appreciate things, but as it stands I did enjoy it, although that feels like the wrong word. "Appreciated it for what it was" maybe, although that sounds like a disservice really. It's not like American History X , where you watch it once, say "that was incredible, but now I feel a bit gross" and you never have to watch it again, but it is a good film and definitely well crafted. The ending starts out as confusing, sweeps liberally into gorefest but by the time it's over, both heart-breaking (if your heart isn't cold, black and shrivelled like mine) and enigmatic enough to get the old grey cells whirring. I just don't envy the set cleaners, I hope they got overtime.
Thanks for getting to this point, but all the decent blogs are in another castle.
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