Some artful notions swirling around in this one, "Possessor," but not necessarily always amounting to much. A conclusion of a loss of empathy seems especially trite to me. There's so much more potential here than some character arch. More than the satire on the real world, too.
We've got mind-body duality of implanted techno body horror (from the son of the master of the subgenre) instead of dreamscape "Inception" (2010), but nonetheless for some generic corporatist plot. There's a bit of "The Puppet Masters" or "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to the scenario, as well. An actress (Andrea Riseborough) playing a character that also is an actress--practicing her lines, fine-tuning facial expressions until literally embodying her character. It's even in her name, Tasya Vos, meaning "resurrection" and "fox," a symbolically trickster animal. A character who wears other people's faces like a mask and whose nightmare is that one of those people wears her face literally as a mask. Body and mental dysmorphia that becomes bizarre digitally dysmorphic cinematic imagery. Seeing artifacts that aren't there. An identity crisis fully emerging from wearing virtual-reality-like goggles to spy through customers' webcams through the eyes of the body that's consciousness has been hacked via Vos hooked up to another virtual-reality set. It's the sort of film-within-a-film that's within yet another film that really makes a character question their reality.
This is what got me wondering, then, about those objects Vos looks at in her debriefing meetings with Jennifer Jason Leigh's Girder (which may mean "satirist," by the way). Interesting how Leigh has been cast in so many such detached, clinician-type parts, at least of late: "Annihilation" (2018) and "Awake" (2021) being two of the latest movies I've seen with her, in addition to "The Woman in the Window" allusion to her part in "Single White Female" (1992). This is also the actress from "eXistenZ" (1999), "The Machinist" (2004) and "Synecdoche, New York" (2008). There probably aren't many actors out there more trained in the ways of reality-bending cinematic reflexivity. More interesting methinks than her ex-husband's use of meta-narratives as realistic movie therapy sessions.
Cronenberg to Cronenberg, but for the actors, Leigh's satirist grooms another actress as her successor. She monitors her character possessing via virtual-reality headwear, illustrates her slasher exploits with bloody big-screen images, and presents her objects from her past--nominally to distinguish her own identity and reality from those she possesses--but, Girder actually advises Vos to detach herself further, from the family connections that distract her from her work. Noah Baumbach should take note.
All of which makes me wonder about those objects, a pipe and a pinned butterfly. The latter seems to fit the transformation and resurrection themes well enough, but that pipe. And, boy, is there a lot of vaping in this one. A tobacco fix that isn't tobacco. A pipe that isn't actually a pipe. People possessed who aren't actually themselves. Consumers and voyeurs, not people. Pornography instead of sex. Dead images in lieu of reality. Ceci n'est pas une pipe à la René Magritte. This is The Treachery of Images. This isn't reality; it's a representation, surreal, virtual, a movie. "Pull me out."
