193 words on Possessor

Oh, to be we.

2020’s visions were distortions in 20/20 vision. The look inward, the look into the abyss, the look in the mirror: what a sight. If vampires have no reflection, Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is about how maybe we’re all vampires. We are what we eat: each other? Also a 2020 vision, Pixar’s Soul has a man’s spirit inhabiting a cat while unborn Tina Fey inhabits him; Possessor articulates the unspeakable horror. In it, in an indeterminate future or darker timeline of now (yes, even darker), corporatized assassins brain-jack people so as to keep their hands clean. Well, their other hands, you see. Possessor’s protagonist is one of the best at this next-level identity theft, but what unfolds is not existential Face/Off, nah: Cronenberg’s concerns are far too concerning. Yes, he shares his father’s proclivity for stark sketches of concepts with fully realized details that turn the stomach and the mind. But Possessor’s greatest moments come in the subreal, where we see the inward abysses of possessed-slash-possessor bloom and bleed into each other. The film is a psychic prism array, refracting selves into frequencies, then interlacing those black rainbows. “What a sight--” we write, “--is right.”