This one got a lot of good reviews, but man do I ever not like it! Apparently, this was a movie made by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon Cronenberg, who probably grew up surrounded by surreal body horror props and scenes and it bled into him, and this is what came in lieu of seeing a therapist.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Possessor is the kind of movie I haven’t seen in a while, got to say. It’s the kind of thing that made my friends and I keep doing these blogs all those years ago, so inept and infuriating that there was nothing to do but crank up the snark. It was fun, and came with an easy outlet for creativity. In recent years we’ve fallen off a bit, sure, and the general premise seems dated now. But every once in a while – hoo, boy, sometimes something just comes along that reignites the fire.
This is about a weird alternate 2008 – according to Wikipedia; it’s never said in the movie. Why 2008? I can't think of that much interesting about that time period. But then, maybe that reflects the movie as well. Might as well be consistent with the uninteresting-ness of everything.
The main character is a dead-eyed weirdo of a woman who works as a professional assassin. The twist is, her company has this convoluted technology where she can jump into the body of someone else to carry out the kill! I seem to remember decades of time in which hits were carried out by the person themselves, who was unknown to the target. Those were better days.
There’s really no reason to do the body jumping, and also, nobody ever seems to acknowledge that they’re wrecking random peoples’ lives when they do it since those people get blamed for the crimes. The main character Tasya, never shows any conflict with this aspect, nor do any of the people she works with. This could be interesting with deft writing, it could show moral conflict or corporate soullessness and such. But guess what’s missing from this movie?!
I guess they try to sell you that Tasya misses her family who she separated from to do the job, and her boss wants her to cut off any human attachments. Tasya goes back and has sex with her husband and sees her kid again, too, before taking a new job. All of the “character development” is just stated blankly in the dialogue, while the movie and actors do nothing to actually convince you. It’s like the script is the shitty public defender for the most irredeemable defendant alive, the worst, guiltiest and least likable person imaginable.
The main plot is that they want Tasya to jump into the body of this guy Tate who is dating the daughter of some high-up business guy. The job is to kill the daughter and the business guy so the assassin company can buy the business guy’s company? Is that even possible? Sure does seem like a lot of nonsense to go through for this fucking goal, and there's no stated reason what the real endgame is or who's behind it all - just Jennifer Jason Leigh's mid-level management character who barely gets any real dimension to her. It’s like the 80s comedies where dorky scientists would invent these whole complex contraptions that just ended up like, making toast or some shit.
The whole movie is like that – I’m sure she could just get into this business asshole’s office somehow and shoot him and be done with it, but then we wouldn’t have a whole movie of art-school bullshit hallucinating scenes for no reason. Yeah – there are a lot of weird trippy scenes just shoved in seemingly whenever the movie was at risk of getting (more) boring, just eyes being pierced and odd hazy blue people screaming and colors flashing like an epileptic nightmare. They do this like half a dozen times in a less than two-hour movie. I guess it’s supposed to represent something. Really it just comes off as the movie equivalent of filling out your term paper with more white space and periods to inflate the character count.
But yeah – despite this being a fairly clear-cut assassination goal, they can’t just go and do that. There has to be this endless soul-sucking drag of random other shit. Tasya as Tate goes to some weird job where he has to look at curtains in peoples’ houses? It’s never really explained but is an excuse to throw some random sex in there. Then he goes to a party where they all have the worst inane conversations rejected from a Tarantino film. Then some more sex, this time with Tate and his girlfriend. If you really need to see this much sex and nudity in a thriller movie, why not just go watch porn? It's not cool, fun sex. It feels weird and gross in the context of this movie.
The party comes, and the idea is for Tasya as Tate to get thrown out of the party and then come back in and kill everyone. Why not just kill everyone right away? If you already went through the process of doing the whole body swap thing, do you need even more pointless rules? Oh, right, I forgot, padding is needed to give this thing a decent runtime. My bad, so silly of me.
If you like gore, I guess the scene of Tasya stabbing this dude in the mouth and wrenching teeth out is something. But I like gore when it's fun - this movie is about as fun as reading tax documents. It's dour and unpleasant. Everything from the sex to the gore is just lifeless, weird and lame.
I guess the story from here is that Tate fights back against Tasya possessing him and stabs himself to stop it – why was that a possibility? Seems like your tech sucks ass. Just go kill people regular next time. It's DIY. Small business, artisanal stuff. It's more all-American, classic style and we need some of that sometimes.
Anyway, it leads to a fragmented mind where he’s seeing a bunch of stuff from Tasya’s life and feeling like he’s going insane. He kills a few more random people as he tries to figure out what the fuck is happening. These scenes of him with his face twisted in agony, not knowing what’s going on and realizing he’s fucked up his life by being associated with what’s happening now are the only relatable scenes in the movie.
There’s at least thirty minutes of meandering nonsense left. It’s amazing how awful the pacing is in this thing. Everything is so slow and yet there’s not even the minimum attempt to endear you to any character or situation. If you wanted to simulate the feeling of being stuck in rush hour traffic, with the sun beating down as you move an inch every five minutes, and you’ve had to piss for the last twenty minutes, fantastic job.
With the whole mind-swapping thing, there’s a super long sequence of Tate taking some mold of Tasya’s face that looks like it was burned in a car accident. It’s not scary but it is weird and gross and makes me hate living a little more. I love that it's superimposed over scenes we already saw in the movie. This thing is less than two hours and we're reusing scenes. it's like being at a party and trying to avoid the annoying guy who won't quit talking to you. When does it end?
Somehow it ends with Tate finding his way to Tasya’s house and killing her husband brutally with a knife. No real reason for all this, but hey, gore! That’s something, right??? It also turns out the boss lady from Tasya’s job takes control of her son and gets him shot too. There’s a lot of screaming, guns firing and a little kid dies – is this an edgy adult dark movie yet? Please, this is all that’s left in life. It doesn’t matter if the motivations are unclear, there’s no discernible character development and the plot is fuzzier than an out-of-focus 1995 disposable camera. All that matters is that the movie is dark and edgy.
Finally it’s over, leaving me with the vague feeling that I’ve seen some weirdo’s school shooter manifesto translated somehow to the screen. It’s not that I’m against dark films, or avant garde shit. I spent quarantine last year watching every David Lynch and Gaspar Noe movie I could find. I’ve seen David Cronenberg’s old material several times. But Possessor is just so awful in every aspect, from the stiff, vague plot to the deadened, nonexistent characters and right down to the stale, too-cold settings and expressions on the character’s faces. It’s just unpleasant in every single way. I truly didn’t enjoy anything about this at all. No exaggeration.
And sure, in old reviews, as was the case in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was en vogue to bash the creators and make all these hyperbolic statements, this is the worst thing ever, et cetera. And I’m not as about that anymore. Brandon Cronenberg is probably an OK guy and I like his dad’s movies. Nothing personal here. I just think Possessor is the void where any kind of hope goes to die, the thing that fills me with nothing but hate and misery towards everything. But nothing personal. You know how it is.