103 min | R | October 2, 2020 | Neon
A corporate assassin hijacks other people’s bodies to carry out her kills, then walks away clean while the host takes the fall. Tasya Vos has done it so many times that her own identity is starting to slip. Brandon Cronenberg makes a body-horror film about losing yourself one job at a time.
Tasya Vos works as an assassin for a corporation that kills by remote control. She uses a brain implant to pilot the body of an unwitting host, commits the murder through that body, then forces the host to die so no trail leads back. Each job demands that she become someone else completely. The film tracks what that process does to the person underneath. Possessor is body horror, but its real subject is the erosion of a self that keeps dissolving into other people.
Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos as a woman going hollow. She rehearses her own personality before visits home, practicing the lines a wife and mother is supposed to say. Riseborough lets the recitation show, and the gap between performance and feeling becomes the character. Christopher Abbott plays Colin Tate, the host she inhabits, and he carries two consciousnesses fighting for one skull. Abbott shifts his posture and cadence as control passes back and forth, so the audience always knows who is driving. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Girder, the handler who treats human possession as a calibration problem, and Sean Bean plays the target John Parse with the casual cruelty of a man who owns everyone in the room.
Brandon Cronenberg writes and directs, and he builds the horror out of texture rather than shock. The possession sequences render identity as melting wax faces and features that smear and recombine, all of it practical and tactile instead of digital. The editing dissolves the boundary between operator and host, cutting between the two until the question of who acts loses its answer. Cronenberg shoots the corporate interiors in clean surgical light and saves the lurid reds for the moments when the self comes apart. The sound design stacks competing voices over a single mouth, so possession registers in the ear before the image confirms it.
This is a film about labor and the cost it extracts from the body that performs it. The corporation does not care which hands hold the weapon. It cares that the job closes, and it treats Tasya as equipment to be maintained until she fails. Cronenberg refuses to soften the violence or the dissociation, and he refuses to grant his protagonist a clean way back to herself. Possessor argues that you become what you repeatedly do, and that the person you started as may not survive the becoming.