In Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, an assassin loses herself by inhabiting the bodies of others
In short: Tasya Vos is a professional killer who executes targets by hijacking the minds of unwitting hosts via neural implants. But as she struggles to maintain her own identity, the boundary between her work and her domestic life dissolves, leading to a violent, psychological collapse that leaves her completely untethered.
Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, the 2020 film Possessor explores the erosion of self through the lens of a high-stakes assassination plot. The protagonist, Tasya Vos, played by Andrea Riseborough, performs her hits by inserting her consciousness into a host’s brain. Once the job is finished, she typically forces the host to commit suicide to return to her own body. However, the process is increasingly taxing; Vos suffers from neurological symptoms and finds it difficult to distinguish her professional persona from her life as a mother and wife.
The conflict intensifies when Vos is tasked with killing a wealthy CEO, John Parse, by possessing his future son-in-law, Colin Tate, portrayed by Christopher Abbott. The mission goes awry when Tate’s consciousness fights back, leading to a psychic confrontation that exposes Vos’s private memories to her host. As the two minds clash, the violence spills into Vos’s home, forcing her to confront the very attachments her handler, Girder, insists are making her a weaker assassin. The film’s brutal, visceral style has drawn comparisons to the body horror work of the director's father, David Cronenberg.
Critics have praised the film for its formal sophistication and disturbing originality, with the project earning accolades such as Best Feature Length Film at the 2020 Sitges Film Festival. While the film is noted for its gore and aggressive tone, it also serves as a dystopian observation on the loss of identity in a world where the mind can be manipulated. By the end of the narrative, Vos is stripped of her family, achieving the cold, detached state her handler desired, though the psychological cost remains hauntingly absolute.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Possessor (film)
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