Possessor (Uncut)

We Can Dismember
It For You Wholesale

Possessor (Uncut)
UK/Canada 2020
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Rhombus Media/Rook Films

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Possessor Uncut, as it’s now being called by the IMBD, to somehow differentiate it from the censored US home video version I guess, is the second feature film by Brandon Cronenberg. It’s the first one I’ve seen by him and, when I sat down to watch it, I tried to promise myself that I would try not to compare it to the works of his illustrious father, David. Easier said than done however and, I hope I don’t do the gentleman an injustice in saying that this does feel like an extension of the kind of high concept sci-fi and body horror films of Cronenberg Sr. You will probably see elements in terms of ideas which could be said to share common DNA with his fathers films... conceptually like the wonderful eXistenZ but in terms of certain elements of production design, a raft of movies like Shivers (reviewed here), Rabid (reviewed here) and so on through to around about Videodrome. I say this as a compliment rather than as a negative vibe and I certainly hope the reader will take it as such.

In the film we are introduced to Tasya Vos, played by Andrea Riseborough (Mandy from... err.. Mandy, reviewed here)... who is a ferocious assassin, somewhat estranged but, not completely, from her young boy and husband (played by Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald). She basically utilises technology which transports her psyche into another person’s body so she can carry out hits for the company she works for, becoming the dominant personality in that body. She then has to be ‘pulled out’ from the body she’s cohabiting, remembering to shoot herself, preferably through the brain, as she exits, so to leave no trace behind of what has happened. She is run by Girder, played by the always brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh as her controller and, after she pulls out, she is given a series of basic tests to make sure the experience hasn’t left her tainted with the personality of the person she has been inhabiting for the required number of days of body infiltration.

As the processes of the film and various things are revealed, we also realise Tasya is kind of cracking up. Something is very wrong and, when she goes to see her husband, whom she is half separated from, she has to rehearse herself to sound like herself, just as she rehearses phrases and tones of expression of the people who she’s going to jump into. There’s also a somewhat psychotic tendency that seems to be developing in her. The very strong opening, where the wonderfully lit, beautiful sets are splashed with the blood of her latest kill, as we see her personality in action, demonstrates that, rather than go for a very quick, clean kill, she prefers to not use a pistol and instead use sharp objects like knives (or even relatively blunt ones) to repeatedly attack the people she is sent to kill.

And, of course, once she jumps into the person who is going to be the unwilling perpetrator of her next hit, Colin Tate (played by Christopher Abbott), things start to go a bit pear shaped for her and the edges begin to blur between who she is and who she is inhabiting. Is she the dominant personality anymore and, if not, how will she get out after her latest act of highly paid violence.

It’s a cool film which uses colour well. The director tends to use the clinical whites of his personal cinematic legacy, mixed in with warm reds and oranges for a good deal of the film. Indeed, after the opening set piece of violent demise, Tasya has her host body rub her hand in the blood and it’s a colourful, visual metaphor as she ensures ‘the mark’, so to speak, is caught literally red handed before ensuring she is blown away by security. And then, as if to say “No, you’ve not got me just yet!”, Cronenberg suddenly introduces the office surrounding of the next mark, Colin Tate, which is just huge swathes of green bashing against the rest of the film’s colour palette. Lovely stuff.  

The film also pushes a few other literary and cinematic buttons as it makes its way towards a conclusion which is, for the most part, highly satisfying. For example, this is a really old plot device. Once again, as I have been constantly for the last ten or so years of American cinema, I am confronted with the visualisation of old 1950s/60s science fiction magazine style concepts. I’ve long gotten tired of this but that’s usually because the writers and directors who filch these ideas don’t execute them in anything other than a lethargic manner. Cronenberg does it very well and, like one or two films of his pop's, this one seems to play out like something you might find in a Philip K. Dick novel. Indeed, right at the start, the actress playing the current host body to Vos has to go through a process which the audience later comes to understand as a recalibration exercise to maintain the connection between the host and the assassin. However, as soon as I saw this done the first time, I felt like I was looking at someone who was using a similar device to the Mood Organs used in Philip K. Dick’s novels Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner, reviewed here) and We Can Build You.

Another thing I think I spotted is the influence, perhaps, of the good old Italian giallo cinema on the odd scene or two. After taking a severe beating, actor Sean Bean’s character has his face pinned to the floor through the centre of it with some kind of iron poker and his eye popped out in a sequence which is fairly picturesque and with a mise en scène that just screams giallo. It felt to me like it had a common thread to the films of Dario Argento, specifically Tenebrae (reviewed here). I was surprised when, reading the trivia on the IMDB after I’d watched this, the director does admit Argento as one of the influences on this film, specifically his wonderful giallo Opera. Like I said, that’s not the film I would have said was the most like this but, if Cronenberg is not talking about the slickness of his cinematic violence then it may be that he’s talking about the duality of the central protagonist in Opera, sharing a somewhat confused attitude to the murders she witnesses.

The film has an equally compelling score to it by Jim Williams which is, alas, not available as a proper CD option at the time of writing (and I’m not going for a stupid electronic download, thanks very much). This revs up the tension in certain places in the film, quite literally, as it sometimes sounds not unlike the noise made by someone revving up their motor vehicle engine... but in a musical way. This is a nice touch and really works well here. I’d love to hear this as a stand alone listen.

At any rate, Possessor... or Possessor Uncut, if you prefer (and that would be the one to go for if you intend watching it), is a really nice little masterpiece of science fiction cinema and fans of Cronenberg senior will, I’m sure, have a good time with this one. It’s got a wonderful ending (which didn’t get nearly as convoluted as I thought it was going to but, you know, sometimes simplicity doesn’t have to be a cop out) and I’m having a really hard time, to be honest, trying to figure out what the censors in the US could actually find to cut out of this. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen in previously certified films and, honestly, it says more about the strange mindset of the people who demand these cuts than it does about the pieces of art they are defacing. Seek out the uncut version of Possessor, for sure. It’s a really nice piece of movie making and I hope its not taken as an insult if I say that Brandon Cronenberg’s movie easily lives up to the masterpieces of the art form that his dad crafted. Now I have to try and see his first film, Antiviral, at some point soon. Which, you know, would certainly be on topic for the kind of year we are having, I would guess.

Raw (aka Grave)

Rof doog ti si tahw?

Raw (aka Grave)
France/Belgium 2016
Directed by Julia Ducournau
UK cinema release print.

Back in 1989, my cousin and I were scanning the local newspaper trying to find something to do for the evening. We didn’t know any of the movies playing so we went to the film review section and found a certain movie which the guy writing the article said was the sickest, shocking, most over the top depraved drama he’d ever seen... so of course, me and my cousin decided to definitely go and see that one. As it transpired, the movie was in no way even remotely sick, shocking or depraved, by a long shot. In fact, if we hadn’t read the review we probably wouldn’t even had known we were supposed to feel shocked. I vowed never to be taken in by such hyperbole written by someone who obviously had the naivete and life experiences of a three year old again but... oh dear, it just happened to me once more.

I was surprised that my local Cineworld even got Raw, to be fair. They usually don’t show subtitled films and they tend to warn people that the film they are about to see is "in foreign". I always get offended by this and also by the fact that the Cineworld App lists this movie with French in brackets, to somehow distinguish it from the other films and single it out as something to be wary of. It’s a despicable practice and it needs to stop. Non-English language films are quite often better made and more interesting than their Hollywood counterparts and it fills me with range that the cinema thinks so little of people that they think the potential audience somehow need warning about this stuff.

As for the film itself, well... I got kind of angry when I left the cinema because this film has a reputation for having a lot of people being sick in the audience and also walking out to vomit etc. I don’t think I’m in any way jaded to the spectacle of cinema and all I can say is that if this was truly their reaction to this movie... well... modern audiences must be very fragile to think this stuff is in any way intense or shocking. Either that or they’re all five years old and have not seen many movies yet. To be fair, I have noticed a steady decline in teenagers these days being in any way experimental or willing to throw themselves into experiences so, perhaps, this general dumbing down in the ability to interact with life might explain the reaction to this movie. Whatever it is... I really can’t fathom it.

So, Raw has a few nice things about it, to be fair, but for every nice thing that tries to elevate it, something else is always there to counter it so, I’ll deal with the positive things first because... well... it’s just nice to open with positive things.

Okay... so the acting style of the movie is very naturalistic, in that it’s not overblown or overly dramatic. More Robert Altman than Steven Spielberg, so to speak. Nothing is played, at least by the actors inhabiting their characters, as in anyway shocking or heavy. It is what it is and the three main protagonists... Garance Marillier as Justine (with whom we share the world POV with... so she’s kind of the main protagonist, if you will), Ella Rumpf as Justine’s sister Alexia and Rabah Nait Oufella as Justine’s room mate Adrien... are all absolutely impeccable in their roles. So that’s cool.

There are also the occasional, nicely done shot designs and a certain tendency to insert throw away images which could be easily mistaken for an almost surreal dreamscape in certain areas of the film... although when these things blend with the actual narrative, they tend to play almost as red herrings rather than actually belonging to an altered state of consciousness. And... that’s it on the good stuff, I think.

Onto the bad...

Well, the story is somewhat clumsy, I felt. It’s all set during Justine’s first week at a veterinarian college as she undergoes, with her fellow ‘freshers’, an intensive ‘hazing’ ritual. Hazing is pretty much a stupid, ritualistic and primitive practice which I wish students would grow out of now. There’s no excuse for this juvenile stuff. Anyway, that’s what the story is about and the vegetarian Justine is more or less forced to eat a raw rabbit kidney. From there on she gets a taste for raw, uncooked meat... particularly of the human kind. And that’s when the film really goes belly up, in a way. This is because the sequence of events throughout the movie... right up to what I’m assuming is supposed to be some kind of  twist ending coda, by the way it’s dramatically revealed but which most people will see coming from the first ten minutes of the film anyway... is all so predictable. It’s almost as if the director is sign posting various things are going to be happening each time something is ‘on the cards’ soon and I felt very let down by this.

And it’s very ham fisted, too.

Not in any way subtle... which is where some of the film's allegedly gruesome sequences might have seen the benefit, big time, in supporting the naturalistic style of the actors in the movie. Instead, the director decides to have Jim Williams’ score slowly dialling up to eleven at certain narrative points like the end cycle of a whistling kettle coming to a boil and... yeah... it really doesn’t work here, to be honest. It’s like the director knows her film isn’t having the kind of effect she is going for so she’s looked for a composer to emphasise certain elements and then wielded his score like a blunt instrument to try and beat the audience into submission and say “Look... this bit’s supposed to be really edgy and unbearable because the music is bashing your ear drums to tell you it is... right?” And that’s a shame because, for all I know, the images with a more subtle score might have packed more punch but, yeah,  this doesn’t do the material any justice. And it’s a shame in more ways than one because it’s actually a great musical score in its own right and I’m sure it would be cool as a regular stand alone listen... it just seems inappropriate to the style of imagery, to be honest. And, of course, as luck (or company stupidity) would have it, you can only get the score as an electronic download rather than on a proper CD so... I’m destined never to hear this thing again, I suspect.

And that’s about as much as I can say about Raw. It may be okay and have some meaning for youngsters or first time movie goers who are not in any way versed in the language of cinema but for the average movie goer I would say that you should be mindful that it is very predictable and certainly won’t show you anything you haven’t really seen before. In fact, if you want to see a much better French movie about one woman’s obsession with eating flesh, then I would recommend the excellent film In My Skin (aka Dans Ma Peau), starring and directed by Marina de Van as a much more mature and somewhat surreal alternative to similarly themed, obsessive subject matter. As for Raw, well... I was hoping for something special from this one but, alas, it was not to be.