Grand prize at the last Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival (which only took place online), Possessor should have known a theatrical release. The pandemic crisis has prompted its distributor to offer it as of today on VOD and to broadcast it on DVD and Blu-ray from April 14. If Brandon Cronenberg’s second feature film stood out from the all-comer of the so-called genre production offered by the festival, it is because it achieved something quite rare today: a sort of ideal synthesis, that of imaginary speculation and narrative, of suspense and abstraction. Possessor revives one of the motives of modern science fiction, properly Dickian, a motive which makes it a kind of theoretical fiction, defying the rules of representation, and which encourages, behind an appearance of series B or rather by feeding on its conventions , fairly playful reflections on the very status of cinema images.
Tasya Vos is a contract killer. She works for a secret organization which allows her, thanks to implants, to take control of the body envelope of a “host” and to commit assassinations on command. The “visible” identity of the killer, systematically committing suicide after his crime (the agent’s spirit is then brought back to his real body), thus removes the suspicions of the real perpetrators and motives of the murder. During a mission (to assassinate a rich businessman by assuming the identity of his son-in-law) a sort of short-circuit is triggered, the mind of the individual “recipient” tempting, it seems. it, to regain control of its own body.
Spectacular performance
Even more than literature, cinema appears as the ideal medium for the expression of a form of narrative and figurative schizophrenia. The same face, the same body, the same actor must successively represent, even alternately as in the second part of the film, two distinct egos. This incident also offers the actors concerned (Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott), forced to express contradictory emotions at the same time, the opportunity for a spectacular performance. The spectator of the film thus sees himself thrown in the center of a formal and theoretical labyrinth, all in trompe-l’oeil and illusion, without having the certainty that what he sees is what he must see.
The identity of a movie character, who is, after all, only a pure convention imposed by an artificially fabricated fiction, therefore appears as the creation of the mind of the spectator misled by the initial postulate. The anguish expressed by the film is not simply produced by the suspense (will the killer succeed in accomplishing her mission and find her family?), But also by the uncertainty weighing on the very identity of her. here and its prey. This disorder is also subjected here to an additional test, since it is a change of sexual identity that the heroine of the film experiences, facing the infinite enigma of the enjoyment of the other sex.
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