Possessor (2020)

Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor arrives with the cold sheen of a surgical instrument and a family name attached to it. Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, a contract killer who rents other people's bodies through a brain implant and vacates them by compelling the host to destroy himself. The film is grimy, precise, and deeply unpleasant in the way its director's father once made unpleasantness a national export. It has no interest in instructing anyone about anything, which comes as its own kind of relief.

The protagonist is a woman, and the film declines to make anything of it. She is not a symbol, not an empowerment arc, not a rebuke to anything in particular. The supporting cast includes performers of color who move through the story with no commentary attached to their presence. The body horror, of which there is a great deal, exists to unsettle the stomach, not to celebrate any physique. The tremors and dissociative fugues that plague Vos are horror mechanics, engines for generating dread, and no viewer will mistake them for a tender portrait of neurological difference. On the subject of romance and identity, the film simply has nothing to say, and says it loudly.

The sole faint pulse of contemporary complaint comes from the architecture. A shadowy corporation runs the killings, and the target is a wealthy chief executive, which lends the proceedings a sour, cynical odor of institutional dehumanization. That is texture, not thesis. Nobody delivers a monologue about the system. The film would sooner show us a man pushing a gun into his own mouth. We have sat through many pictures that wanted to teach us something. This one only wants to hurt us, and it does.