The director’s thrillingly ingenious tale of mind-invasion technology, starring Andrea Riseborough, barrels towards the most outrageous final twist imaginable
With her recent appearance in Panos Cosmatos’s sepulchral horror Mandy opposite a baying, gurning Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough became the smartest sort of contemporary scream-queen specialist. Now her face looms redly out of this unspeakable nightmare of the near future, a mask of fear and blood. Possessor is the highly unsettling new picture from 40-year-old Canadian film-maker Brandon Cronenberg, and it shows the influences of his father David’s early work, particularly the cranium-splitting revulsion of Scanners. It’s a thoroughly macabre satire of surveillance, corporate management, paranoia and power, with hints of Coppola’s The Conversation and Nolan’s Inception. There were, incidentally, moments when I even heretically wondered if Possessor had a bit more dramatic life and forward movement than Inception.
Possessor is, above all, an ultra-violent sci-fi-horror freak-out that will probably have you hiding your face in your hands. (That’s what I did.) Almost the very first shot is of someone inserting a clinical needle deep into their own scalp. But the gore has to be seen in the context of a strangely ingenious and interestingly thought-through story that has the most outrageous and disturbing final twist imaginable.