Possessor

 

Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor is a promising first feature that fail to coalesce into a memorable work. Andrea Riseborough portrays an assassin who works for a company which has the technology to enable her to inhabit other peoples' bodies. Thus, the crimes are enacted by innocent hosts and the guilty are able to escape without a trace. For much of the film, we don't see Ms. Riseborough per se, but Christopher Abbott as a patsy controlled remotely by Riseborough. It is a difficult movie to follow, particularly because Cronenberg uses an oblique method of storytelling that obfuscates the proceedings. When Ms. Riseborough and Mr. Abbott battle for control of his body in some Interzone netherworld (or something), the visual presentation is too cheesy, with melting faces, and indistinct to support the barely fathomable narrative.

It is impossible to write about this film without mentioning Cronenberg's father, David. Brandon Cronenberg's original screenplay is replete with allusions to his father's films: penetrations of humans with a number of inanimate objects, evil corporations, man messing with mother nature, characters who cannot communicate, Jennifer Jason Leigh. It is almost as if Cronenberg the younger was a Renaissance painter taking over his father's studio. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but a master filmmaker's shadow is always hard to escape. Brian De Palma has made many fine films, but sometimes his work seem to be that of a Hitchcockian manqué. Another comparison that comes to mind is that of Andrew V. McLaglen to John Ford. McLaglen's films seem like pleasant, but bland facsimiles of Ford's work. John Wayne and remnants of the Ford stock company are present, but little of Ford's visual distinction or thematic irony.

Possessor is a more flashy, post-modern work than that of Cronenberg pere. David Cronenberg, despite the exploding heads and undulating viscera, is  very restrained as a director. He frames his tales (usually adaptations) in a straightforward narrative style, without busy editing or camera movement, that allows the viewer to relate to his beleaguered characters. Possessor upends our relationship to reality so severely that it is impossible to relate to its characters. It succeeds as an alienating and disorienting experience, but it is too jumbled as a narrative to linger in the mind.