nick121235

This film has a sense of late 70s-early 80s schlock that I'm really here for. At least, half of the time. Sometimes it's serious and philosophical, other times it's over the top camp, and I think a lot of the people who disliked it took it at face value, making it 100% serious all of the time, instead of understanding it as an homage to the insane, campy yet cerebral horror that dominated some sectors of the underground low-budget circuit at the time (including homage to his dad's films like Scanners and The Brood). If you take it as a completely serious film it fails, but I'm not so sure that's what it was intended to be. Antiviral clearly was able to be serious, so this isn't a question of being inept.

And it isn't just the sfx and shifting tone that made me feel it was a 70s schlock homage, even the cinematography has a sense of distance and lack of clarity that was cast aside from the late 80s onward in favor of higher definition. This return to an older visual style was clearly purposeful. Absolutely beautiful cinematography at times, very angular and flat, although at other times it retreats into just being average. I also don't like the use of hand-held shakiness at times (something almost nonexistent in the 70s and 80s), although i understand it's mainly used to convey intimacy at certain points, as it isn't present throughout the film, so it's not a huge detractor. The color palette is another cool visual aspect of the movie, shifting back and forth from the pastel yellows and browns of the 70s and the bright blues and reds of the 80s, along with Brandon's own signature minimalist white.

The plot is quite interesting as well, dealing with the question of the alienation of modern day life and how we deal with it- a question ever present in all of David Cronenberg's films (even when it was occasionally more muted) as well as being dealt with in Brandon's previous film, Antiviral. It comes across in the plot, tone, and look of the movie. Like his father's earlier films, Possessor manages to be both campy, horrifyingly violent, and philosophically fecund, and also with more of a focus on anti-capitalism, a theme within Brandon's works that gives him a new horizon to explore, different from his father's works, despite the fundamental shared problem of alienation.

It isn't just alienation though. Brandon Cronenberg's first film, Antiviral, was completely drenched in alienation. There was simply nothing beyond that, no real human connection, we had been totally and irreversibly caught up in the reification of modern life, of a capitalism that had so consumed us and the planet that we had to turn to eating the synthetic flesh of celebrities, contracting their very illnesses (the illness of the Other, aka desire) to gain even a modicum of connection with another human being. And that all consuming alienation isn't necessarily a bad thing, although it can be bleak and tonally monotonous, monochrome (like the all white color palette). After all, I'm quite happy Brandon picked up this obsession with alienation from his dad (it so speaks to the reality of modern life), as his father also focused unvaryingly on alienation, especially in films such as Crash, Cosmopolis, The Dead Zone, and Naked Lunch. But there are others by the man that introduced a dichotomy, not so much a dialectic but a tension, between alienation and connection, the reified and the human, most exemplified in films such as Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, eXistenZ, and Spider. This is what I believe Cronenberg the younger is trying to do here; he's trying to walk that fragile line between our objectification, our (seemingly) unrelenting separation from the earth and from each other, and those cracks in the facade where the Real breaks through the digital wall of modernity and creates little threads that connect us to one another, and remind us that we are, in fact, human.

And yet, another fundamental question lies beneath the one of explicit alienation. That is, are we interchangeable? What makes us who we are? Do we know why we do the things we do? If someone else woke up in your body tomorrow, would those around you notice? Or are they too preoccupied with their own lives, is the wall of alienation between you too great? Would it even matter to them at all?

As many have pointed out, this film draws from eXistenZ. While true, I think this influence is mostly surface level (it's really no more similar to that film than Antiviral was to Rabid). They are, tonally, complete opposites, with eXistenZ feeling much more vibrant and playful, having the intensity of an action film and focusing on the way technology shapes reality itself, while Possessor is a much more subdued film, a slow burn with intense atmosphere and only bursts of camp and action, as well as less questions about reality itself and more of a focus on the way technology shapes subjectivity, destroying connection with an all consuming wave of reification, with humanity being much more fragile and hard to find here. The technology of eXistenZ had a much more optimistic undertone (and don't forget that technology in eXistenZ is a game, while everything here is very, very real), while in Possessor technology is literally a tool for the assassination of both human beings, and humanity and subjectivity itself. Will we, collectively, be able to survive our own technology, or will we become agents, assassins, of the destruction of all that makes us who we are? Is technology our tool? Or is it our master?

It's funny that I had written about Nietzsche's eternal return and amor fati in my last review, because it's so much more up front in this film. Many think his work is nihilist, but of course those that know him are aware that nihilism is the very thing he was attempting to stop the world from descending into, which is the core message of this movie. Instead of reviewing this movie at all, I will simply provide a quote from The Gay Science, that echoes this film in both its poetic beauty and message:

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.

The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"