Possessor Uncut

It is a singular work – one so ghastly, so unique, and so brutal that it will awe some and disgust others.

Scenes of faces melting and bodies merging have a satisfyingly tactile feel, harking back to the experimental cinematic trickery of Georges Méliès, albeit with added 21st-century oomph. There’s a real physical depth to Possessor that helps keep the story grounded even during its most outlandish flights of fantasy.

There's an emotional logic to the action and imagery, carrying viewers along even if they're not quite sure if they're rooting for the innocent man or his troubled attacker.

Brandon has apparently inherited a great deal from his father both in terms of his filmmaking techniques and his taste in material. As science fiction, Possessor is a little disappointing – it does too little with a pregnant premise crying out for deeper inspection. As horror, however, it’s a rousing success – a shocking and disturbing gem that doesn’t betray itself by softening things during the final act.

The out-of-bodiness you feel from the filmmaking is almost more unsettling than the actual story. It’s pure cinematic dysmorphia: to watch this movie carefully is to feel completely out of place, right alongside the people onscreen.

Possessor is humorless, start to finish. Its energy is ponderous and glum, and the provocative ideas are not given a chance to really take on a life of their own. Still, there's much here that is imaginative and fresh.

As both writer and director, Cronenberg focuses so intently on the surface that he neglects to include enough substance.

Made with this provocative enigmatic vision, Brandon Cronenberg takes you on a disturbed thrill ride. With an nearly over-the-top premise this film is extremely original and works well with it. Often i find this film fantastically disturbing if there was such a word to describe it. I found myself unable to look away and often taken a back by the visceral nature of the violence you see in this film. Tasya Vos works for a secretive organization that utilizes brain-implant technology that allows her to take control of specific targeted hosts in order to carry out contract killings. She’s found a specific niche in this field of work, that at times appears to have dramatic effects on her own psyche. As Tasya begins to lose control, she truly begins to struggle to suppress her own violent memories and has trouble controlling certain urges. This specific host for whatever reason begins to resist the hold she has on him and thats when a power struggle ensues that may threaten both’s identities. The surreal and unsettling visuals makes this masterful sci-fi a very memorable experience.

It must be said that Cronenberg modified the plot just enough so it doesn’t feel formulaic. My feelings are mixed, but not without admiration for the film itself.

(Mauro Lanari) An incomprehensibly divisive film: Brandon was able to synthesize both of his father's poetics, the first on the new flesh and the second on the new psyche, but unlike the parent he let himself be imprisoned within the schemes ****, the useless brutality of the gore. He demonstrated that knows how to move from a style at risk of being too conceptual to admirable visual intuitions (as the Glazer of "Under the Skin", 2013), but he manifested shortcomings in the narrative construction (does the protagonist Tasya Vos kill her family because conditioned by her work as a murderess or on the contrary is she a mother and wife with homicidal impulses that tries to channel by acting as a killer?). Not a masterpiece or a garbage: a sufficient movie.

This is a budget, feminised take on Inception (2010). For me an opening scene of some woman furiously weeping is really putting a millstone around the film's neck. The sex scenes in the movie are like commercials on TV, there to pay for the programming or in this case there to keep the audience from tuning out as they certainly not what you expect to see, or, in the flow of the story. The reason the feminism rankles is because the reality is, of all murders committed worldwide 98% are committed by men and that needs to be addressed, in the same way as if the sky were green. Just saying "inclusiveness" as a magic bullet for absurdness is just BS.

Unlike father's masterful gorefests that still have substance and heart, this one seems to be a hollow exercise in meaningless violence and pornography, with little else to show for it. The message is lost with it's empty vagueness and pretentious attempts at profundity. Nepotism at its worst. Maybe in time he'll bloom into the Cronenberg legacy, but from the looks of it, it's not very promising.