‘Possessor Uncut’ is a clinical, nonplussed grotesquery about the fungible nature of identity in an Orwellian surveillance society and Canadian auteur Brandon Cronenberg more than adjudicates how plainly rancorous monolithic corporations are and will be in the adjacent future.
Ala much of his progenitor David’s output, ‘Possessor’ doesn’t knead the film for the squeamish (the opening frame is a mucronate needle into the scalp). As Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) in the aposematic masquerade of an African-American foundling in a track suit, is caressing the blood of her latest fatality, Brandon isn’t the slightest faint-hearted about the aberrant body horror foreignness of the scenario.
While the assassin with a science-fiction twist was emulsified in Rian Johnson’s magnum opus ‘Looper’, Brandon’s temperament is unremittingly moribund with Riseborough in a habitual state of dystopian entropy. Since Tasya has been so embedded in the avatar physiologies of other people, she is incognito with their own corporeal humanity such as her recitation outside of her family’s dwelling (“I’m absolutely starving.”).
With bleached hair, indigo pools for eyes and discomfort with domesticated ideations, Riseborough is distinctively self-ostracized. The macrocosm outside of the Milgrim-esque conference table with Tasya’s handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is fairly turbid about world-building.
The splashes of red gels refracting over the characters’ haunted faces is redolent of Mario Bava. With full-frontal male nudity and tooth extractions with a pitchfork, the NC-17 paucity of censorship is indubitable for the asthmatic and weakly hyperventilating members of the audience. The waxen reconfiguration of Tasya’s metamorphosis from herself to Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) is dysmorphia at its most inwardly frightening.