With roles in projects like MANDY, the Duffer Brothers' HIDDEN, the upcoming GRUDGE reboot, the psychological thriller HERE BEFORE, and the supernatural thriller GEECHEE, actress Andrea Riseborough (who I first saw in the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie OBLIVION) is becoming something of a genre regular. One of the next films we'll be seeing her in is POSSESSOR, which cinematographer Karim Hussain has described as "a very dark and extreme horror movie."
Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg (yes, he is the son of David Cronenberg), POSSESSOR has the following synopsis:
Tasya Vos is an agent for a secretive organization who uses brain-implant technology to inhabit other people’s bodies, driving them to commit assassinations for the benefit of high-paying clients. But something goes wrong on a routine job, and Tasya soon finds herself trapped in the mind of an unwitting suspect whose appetite for violence turns out to rival her own.
Riseborough's co-stars include Christopher Abbott, Rossif Sutherland, Tuppence Middleton, Sean Bean, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
POSSESSOR will be making its world premiere at the next Sundance Film Festival (which runs from January 23rd through February 2nd), and in anticipation of the premiere a handful of stills have been released online. They were shared by Hussain himself in the embed below.
Speaking with Birth.Movies.Death., Hussain dug a little deeper into the concept:
They kidnap people and implant mind-control devices into their brains, and then those people are piloted by a sort of performer who goes into a kind of coma and guides them via these implants to commit lone-wolf assassinations that are good for the financial and political gains of the company involved. Now, that sounds like a standard science-fiction concept, but then the movie really steps it up when something goes wrong with one implant, and the bodies of Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott’s characters sort of fuse into one individual being — and the weird stuff begins."
Hussain said all the major effects in the film were done live, including
very radical, strange projection effects and rolling shutter effects to make things look like they’re melting live. We did acoustic levitation, which is making objects fly in the air using sound, and an optical illusion you can only see in camera that makes it look like water is freezing by throwing a signal through a subwoofer that hits a channel of water and synchronizing the camera shutter and speed to a frequency. It was all very fun techniques that had their roots in science to create the movie’s hallucinatory world."
So it sounds like POSSESSOR is going to be a very interesting film, one worth looking forward to.