In the Flesh: Possessor

Just before psychic assassin Tasya Vos seizes control over the body of Colin Tate, one of the technicians operating the machinery which connects her to Tate’s mind tells her it might be “a little bumpy” going in. The images accompanying her transition are electrifying. A wet, waxy substance outlining the form of an invisible body, then flying away from its surface as though siphoned up by an enormous pipette. Arms and fingers shivering into being out of some sort of pinkish gel, textured skin spreading over their surfaces like mold. When the film does dip into more conventional images of embodiment — faces blurred together, for instance — it does so with rigorous craftsmanship, giving us a momentary glimpse of deformed skulls and paired abscesses gaping along the lipless edges of twisted, wailing mouths.

The film’s explosive moments of gore are likewise arresting, from its two relentless knifing scenes to the nightmarish spectacle of a gunshot punching through a skull from front to back. At intervals it dabbles in flashes of interior anatomy, ridges of glistening meat and pulsing viscera glimpsed for a moment and then sucked into the flashing lights and fathomless darkness of the spaces between minds. At no point does director Brandon Cronenberg trade on his father’s visual signatures or ape his style, hewing closer to the dark ambient aesthetic sensibilities of Glazer, Cosmatos and their ilk. Brought to life by a crew of sculptors, digital effects artists, prosthetics artisans, and silicone workers, the visual feel of Cronenberg’s film is simultaneously current and adventurous, its icky flashes of embodied physicality poking purposeful holes in the film’s clinical remove.

It’s that focus on craftsmanship perhaps more than anything else that makes Possessor so much fun to pick apart from a design and VFX standpoint. The work is clearly rigorous, the techniques on display varied and intelligently combined. More than that, though, their quality is most evident in how readily one can become immersed in the strange world of corporate violence and psychic molestation the edges of which they animate. And unlike so many modern horror directors, Cronenberg never leaves his ephemera lying on the table long enough for them to become commonplace, or even wholly comprehensible. Instead our glimpses of the fractured world of Vos’s psychonautic violence remain just that: fractured and violent, fleeting impressions of some malformed and revolting whole.