Brandon Cronenberg remains first-and-foremost an effective stylist, and with his latest film Possessor, the conceptual framework provides ample opportunities for perverse and transgressive artistic constructions. It's always refreshing when a film doesn't feel the need to explain itself, and one Possessor's greatest strengths early on is how attuned it is to submerging the audience into the technocratic fever-dream, one in which the film's low-fi allegory emerges organically across its narrative. Possessor stumbles when it comes to providing an astute exploration of its core thematic intent related to failings of technocratic utopianism & the increasing invasiveness of the employer-employee binary, yet I couldn't help but admire the cinematic language employed here, one rooted in a steady-state of uncertainty between consciousness and the material world, a perfect device for deployment of such themes related to notions of progress brought forth by a technocratic capitalist society. Possessor largely struggles to form an emotional connection with the audience, instead opting for a moody, atmospheric state of dread. Our main protagonist is merely a cog in the larger machine, an individual whose lack of autonomy has been normalized in this social milieu. The film subtextually seems to express concerns about the hubris of tech and innovation when not tied to the larger social apparatus, demonstrating through its narrative arch the coercive effects on humanity which are brought by tech which implicitly disregards the unquantifiable aspects of the human genome. The text of the film can largely be deduced into two souls in confrontation for one body, with one variant reading being related to how even our body itself is perceived as nothing more than a utility by our employer and the larger technological apparatus who attempts to siphon value and in turn profit. While the film never completely congeals across all thematic fronts it navigates, Possessor is a stylish nightmare, a descent into a not-so-distant alternate reality in which one's mind and body are at the service of one's employer - the economic subjugating the social due to its higher place among the hierarchy of society, which leads to friends and family being expendable quite literally in the film's denouement.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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