Possessor, review: Cronenberg Jr serves up a sleek, eerie sci-fi thriller

Cert TBC, 104 min. Dir: Brandon Cronenberg. Starring: Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Sean Bean, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tuppence Middleton

With a name like Cronenberg in the director’s chair, the viewer automatically adopts something of a brace position. Possessor comes not from David, but his 40-year-old son Brandon, whose one film to date – the satirical shocker Antiviral (2012) – boasted some truly skin-crawling ideas about the celebrity meat market.

His follow-up is a sleekly impressive foray into science-fiction thrills, with just a few moments of lingering gore to molest your eyeballs – not unlike the throat-slitting in his dad’s Eastern Promises. The overall effect is stark. Beneath the film’s body-snatching concept and cool, neon glow is a savagely nihilistic vision of human exploitation.

Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott share top billing in a film that’s a kind of one-way Face/Off. We start with her, until she jacks into his kidnapped frame and takes control; and then she loses control. Her character is a trainee assassin called Tasya Vos, whose job is to carry out murders for a shadowy corporation while, each time, inside the body of a different fall guy.

These takeovers are achieved with a variation on a virtual-reality set-up, with a lot of cables, and a proboscis-style implant injected into the cortex. In the role of her boss and overseer, Jennifer Jason Leigh may be here in long-range homage to eXistenZ, but must also check up periodically on her agent’s sanity. After one of these brutal trips inside someone else, a post-mortem psych-evaluation is needed to check she’s come back in one piece.

The company’s next stooge is Colin Tate (Abbott), a low-level employee at a rival tech firm, who owes his job to the fact that he’s dating the daughter (Tuppence Middleton) of the big-cheese owner, John Parse (Sean Bean). Through him, a hit on Bean’s nasty entrepreneur must be carried out, but first a plausible motive needs seeding, so that Colin’s actions don’t just come bewilderingly out of the blue.

Riseborough’s unstable performance – Tasya seems incapable of a clean hit, and has a troubling, near-vampiric obsession with blood – is an asset in itself, and exactly the nervy read on this role you’d expect from her. From an acting point of view, what’s especially ingenious about Cronenberg’s conceit is how Tasya’s psychosis carries through into Abbott’s work, the moment she has taken Colin over.

An element of role-play – suggesting insecurity, envy, derangement – is vital to make the hit on Bean persuasive. Something needs to seem amiss with Colin, which covers Tasya’s tracks if she doesn’t manage to simulate, say, his morning breakfast routine quite perfectly. Indeed, Middleton’s Ava notes a strange shift in his personality, though can hardly guess what it portends.

That said, it’s unclear to us, and even to her, how much control Tasya has in pulling the puppet-strings. Her rookie skills are in question; her manipulations keep slipping up. Abbott’s job, which this dab hand at brooding does brilliantly, is to tune in to this precarious inner struggle and suggest two psyches mashing each other up.

The film’s juggling act peaks at Bean’s gaudy mansion, during a drinks reception where Tasya-as-Colin is sent in to pick a fight. Cronenberg’s direction gives this the suave assurance of a good Nolan set piece, replete with outré trappings of wealth, Sistine-esque ceiling frescoes and all the rest. Bean’s sketch of a mean drunk with contempt for his workforce thickens the air with hostility, and the violence that explodes that night is almost dazzlingly grotesque.

At its core, Possessor is built on more familiar ideas than Antiviral (a squirmy one-off that it would be hard to trump for its pungency). Base notes of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List waft in – the films share an eerie composer, Jim Williams – and the cyber-noir trappings of William Gibson are all over it.

If Possessor sometimes feels like a clever exercise, it’s one Cronenberg aces stylistically, making the most of his nightmarish colour schemes and pregnant, furtive sound design. These jostling images, duelling performances, and meltdowns of reality put us in a world where nothing we’re seeing is meant to be happening. We’re just lucky not to be living there.

Possessor is available on demand from November 27