Possessor

Tasya Vos performs assassinations through a neural implant: she enters someone else's body, commits the killing with it, and then makes that person kill themselves. On her latest job she loses control and the host's own consciousness starts fighting back. It is Brandon Cronenberg's second film. Andrea Riseborough plays Vos and Christopher Abbott the body she occupies, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Bean and Tuppence Middleton alongside. Karim Hussain shot it and Jim Williams wrote the score. The way it shows identity slipping is entirely visual and practical, using melting face casts and colour shifts rather than digital work. The violence is practical in the same way, which is why it played in the United States in an uncut version. It premiered at Sundance in January 2020, opened in North America that October and in the UK in November, and grossed 901,093 dollars. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 94 percent, with a consensus that Cronenberg uses a potentially over-the-top premise as a delivery mechanism for stylishly disturbing thrills. It won Best Feature and Best Direction at the 2020 Sitges Film Festival. Who it is for: viewers who like body horror and the dissolution of identity. Who it is not for: anyone with no tolerance for graphic violence. The film does not shorten those scenes, which is precisely why an uncut version exists.