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Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg · 2020

OVERVIEW

Brandon Cronenberg's second feature, released in 2020. An assassin works for a company that drops her consciousness into other people's bodies to carry out killings, then pulls her back out. The job is eroding her sense of which mind is hers.

The technology is shown as workplace equipment: a rig, a calibration procedure, a supervisor watching a monitor. The horror is procedural before it is bodily.

WHY IT MATTERS

Cold corporate technology rendered as intimate psychological horror.

CONTEXT

Made in Canada on a modest budget, with practical effects and analogue optical work by Dan Martin rather than digital compositing for the transition sequences.

It belongs to a small run of films treating identity as infrastructure, and it is impossible to watch without his father's work in mind, though the interest here is corporate process rather than biology.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01The calibration ritualBefore each job she rehearses objects and phrases to prove the mind is hers. Watch how the film uses that scene as a measuring instrument.
  2. 02Analogue transitionsThe possession sequences are optical and physical, melted and printed rather than rendered. They look wrong in a way digital does not.
  3. 03Corporate interiors do the workBeige rooms, task lighting, a supervisor's headset. The violence is extreme; the surroundings are an office.
  4. 04Colour as stateSaturated reds arrive only when control is slipping. The palette is otherwise deliberately dull.

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