11/3/2020 - Possessor (2020) - 8-/10 - 

Inception meets Scanners & Manchurian Candidate with Drive and Crash (1996) sensibilities. It’s dark, heady, and visceral sci-fi that thrills as one melts into the horrors it weaves. There is an ambiguity that evokes existential bleed out; looking in the thin mirror of dirty blood and losing an absolute sense of identity, purpose, and attachment to the concept of singular self. It is evocative and de-tethering, balancing both shock and awe in its mind/self diffuse. Possessor strikes me as the kind of understated brilliance that will be looked back upon as staggering and seminal; similar to something like Primer.

From the opening scene to the last frame, Cronenberg embraces his father’s horrific aura. Body horror and the maddening intensity of rampant bloodshed; the damning dance of penetration and splatter. It is never the cartoony blood splatter of a Tarantino, but there is no punch pulled with the expulsion of life essence. To take a life, and life itself, is a staining affair, to one’s persona as much as one’s shirt. Reverence is paid to the horror, the beauty of its ichor and the adaptability of its inundation.

I loved the answers not given just as much as I enjoyed the fascinating near-future it is set in. We are given hints and tiny windows into this world and its capabilities. One thing we know for sure: EVERYBODY VAPES. Ev-ree-one. We also don’t have the people or their relations fully explained, which leaves us unbound, floating in the ether of secret liaisons and unspoken emotional scars. The viewer remains unmoored to time, place, and person; an experience of instilling meaning and intention behind the eyes of the unknown in a murky sea. I savored the nebulousness and import placed on the minute moments.

There is a richness to the texture of the emotions and thought processes presented. Calculated and consequential; a poignant puzzle that we are slowly doled out pieces for but never to be put together. It was exciting in its vibrancy of vision and its responsive revulsion. Perhaps for those who don’t generally partake in such gore, sexuality, or violence, they may see a dazzling but vacant shell; a huff of aspiration that will not fill their sails. But for me, I was enraptured; enthralled in a twisted and pulsating science fiction thriller from a voice of lineage but a voice anew and aggressively arousing.

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SPOILERS

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He left Sean Bean alive as a joke, right? Because he dies in every movie he is in, the time when he is targeted to die and is viciously attacked, he must survive. Intended or not, I appreciated it.