Possessor (2020): Who are we when no one's watching?

There are many kinds of fear one may encounter in their life, but the most chilling kind may be the one where you’re afraid of yourself. The state of consciousness is often described as a necessary condition of being human. Whether or not this is true – and there’s a lot of debates about it – the idea of being aware of oneself is central to the concept of existence and life. It’s horrifying to imagine being alive but with no consciousness. What would it be like, to lose control of yourself? To feel as if someone else is in control, not only of your body but also of your mind?

(Image credit: Mashable India)

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is a horror film of a higher degree. While most horror movies seek to provoke and frighten us at the most primal level, only the most sophisticated films will attempt to go beyond terrifying us, which is to scar us. The latter is different. Mainly because it causes permanent damage. If you watch a horror film riddled with jump scares and provocative imageries, chances are you will walk out of the cinema and within half an hour, you will likely lose all of that fear. Films that terrify us introduce ideas that linger, grow and feed on our minds like parasites. Hereditary plants the idea of family disorder; Babadook plants the notion of grief; and Possessor plants the idea that our mind as we know it might not be entirely ours after all.

Possessor follows a female assassin in a futuristic world. In this world, we have developed a technology that allows assassins to take control of someone else’s body. In doing so, the assassin can commit murder as another person. After brain death is induced, the assassin is reintegrated with her body. The murder becomes either a bewildering tragedy or a logical outcome to a narrative spun by the organization in charge of the assassins. While this concept could be made into an action film, Cronenberg discovers a kernel of horror inside it. He finds that this technology basically renders the idea of being possessed unbearably real.

(Image credit: LRMonline)

Possession is a common staple in horror films. Some of them are done well, such as in The Exorcist and some are done poorly, such as in The Devil Inside. Most of these are united by a common tactic of inducing fear: the corruption of the profane boy with some sort of unholy evil. Possession is often set as the antithesis to the serenity of Christ. This is why most exorcist movies will include a climactic scene where the priests come in to exorcise the demons that have possessed the human body. The diarchy that forms between the holy priests and the unholy possession becomes an allegorical battle between pure devotion (that of a priest) and the unholy forces that corrupt us from the inside (the possession). When an individual is possessed, they are given the worst kinds of actions. While these actions from the internal; the internal is portrayed as corrupted by an external unholy force. Possessions are appealing because as a Christian myth, it reassures us that the horrible impulses inside us can at one point be exorcised by holy devotions.

The Exorcist (1973)

(Image credit: The Exorcist)

Possessions in such films, therefore, contain glimmers of hope. However, before the priest succeeds, they can inspire the worst of horror. Consider the iconic sequences from The Exorcist where the young girl is possessed. There, the corruption of the body gives a literal manifestation to the idea of sinful corruption of innocence. The physical deformity portrayed in those sequences often signal to us the idea that corruption is so deep it cannot be reversed. It is this physical deformity, sometimes the change of voice that is so deeply unsettling. And while Cronenberg recognizes this as a scary concept, he is far more interested in the deformity inside. Whenever the assassin possesses the host body, we are treated to nightmarish sequences that would be completely at home in Cronenberg’s father’s films. We see a horrifying melding of bodies representing the melding of consciousness. We experience the horror of our mind becoming carelessly mixed with another through cinematic forms.

There is one particularly unsettling sequence, where a figure is seen melting into an empty skin mask. The other figure then wears that mask. This scene does not seem to confer the melding of two selves or identities but rather an overlaying of two distinct consciousnesses. The two are aware of each other but are slowly becoming less aware of the distinction. We recall seeing this kind of concept alluded to in films like Ghost in the Shell. Watching that film, we always wondered about how horrifying it would be to see our consciousness become one with another. Cronenberg’s films give that fear a physical manifestation.

The fears represented by Cronenberg’s Possession may be the idea of losing oneself and suddenly becoming a murderer; or the notion that our bodies could be hijacked by an external power. But those do not even compare to a fear verbalized in one of the final scenes of the movie. The host, whose body has been appropriated for murder by the assassin, seems to have regained control of his body. He went to the assassin’s house and held her husband at gunpoint while screaming “You did this to me!”. But the assassin – manifested as another body confronting him inside his mind – simply replied that she was not in control. So, did he commit all those murders? After all, in the two murders that we saw, the possessed body is seen gruesomely deforming the victims. But why do this if you’re the assassin? Would it not be more sensible to have a clean and quick kill?

What Cronenberg suggests with this scene is that perhaps the most unpredictable thing about our mind is not its vulnerability to invasion, but the fact that it might have wanted to be invaded.

The host, in this case, is marrying the daughter of the victim – a rich business owner. The organization wanted to conceal what is a corporate murder case with this other narrative of a son-in-law, consumed by feelings of inferiority, became impulsive and killed the business owner. However, as we see scenes of the business owner – played marvellously by Sean Bean – belittling the son-in-law, we begin to wonder if the son-in-law would actually want to kill him. So, when the assassin mentions that she was not in control. A part of us believes that, perhaps, this whole time it was the host’s own impulsive and repressed anger that really inspired the murder.

Perhaps, all the assassin did was give that impulse an agency it never had.

In that sense, Cronenberg’s story also questions the extent to which the social mores in which we swim masks our true feelings to each other. Many of the shots in this film emphasizes primal violence, crude nudity and sexual impulses. At one point, a character calls her father a “creature”. The voice with which she calls him is imbued with such hatred and disdain, you think she truly believes what she is saying. Even when the characters are happy, there is a pervasive sense of emptiness apparent in the bland sterile set design. Cronenberg creates a world devoid of humanity and highlights the deep primal instinct that lies beneath the layers of constructed social norms.

At the end of the film, another character proceeds to murder the assassin’s family to ensure she has no further emotional connection that may impede her work. The assassin emerges from this emotionally unscathed, completely and willingly transformed. It is a jarring moment, but we also saw earlier that in her ruthless profession, she had come to lose touch with her humanity. She even rehearses the exchanges she would have with her family. Once again, Cronenberg finds horror in this. The few words she rehearsed became her identity- a kind of empty leitmotif. And if your identity is represented just by a few rehearsed words, then nothing can really be underneath. Yet, when she talks to her family, it is completely natural. What Cronenberg cleverly highlights here is how much we actually rehearse our social interactions, even with those closest to us.

(Image credit: The New York Times)

Possession plays like a Freudian nightmare but craftily imbued with Baudrillard’s notions of hyperreality, its manifestation is not just our society but also our minds. On the one hand, our identity is rehearsed, empty and exchangeable. However, through digging and uncovering, we might come to find that what is hidden under our social personas is not pretty. With this film, Cronenberg suggests that what is underneath may be a primal tendency for violence. And if it were given an agency, tragedy may follow, particularly internally.

This internal deformation is horrifying because it might not even matter. The possession is not so much an invasion, but a kind of uniting. One assassin and one disgruntled son-in-law: both animalistic in their pursuit of cathartic violence.