How Possessor subverts expectations to explode the concept of selfhood
Throughout Brandon Cronenberg's arresting sophomore feature we're led to believe Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is having her identity worn away by inhabiting so many bodies - until we understand she never really had one to begin with.
Warning: Spoilers
How do we define our sense of self? At the beginning of the film, Vos is shown a box of items from her past by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
Girder is satisfied that Vos has been restored to her sense of self after inhabiting Holly's (Gabrielle Graham) body when she successfully recalls a memory for each object - particularly after she says she always felt guilty for killing a butterfly she wanted to have pressed, which seems to reveal something deeper about who she is.
Next we see Vos pay a visit to her semi-estranged husband and son, rehearsing how to greet them on her way. At the time this seems to imply Vos still hasn't returned to her old self.
When Vos becomes Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), it seems at first the two are struggling for control of Colin's body, but when the pair finally talk at the film's climax, it's revealed the two characters are actually in some ways working in tandem.
Vos reveals that part of Colin wanted to kill John Parse (Sean Bean) and Colin's girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton). This would explain why John's body was brutalised, payback for his cruel treatment of Colin, while Ava's death by gunshot is more clinical and professional.
When Colin threatens to kill Vos's husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland), she tells him to go ahead, he's only holding her back. It seems in direct contradiction to previous scenes where Vos appeared to have a close but uneasy relationship with her family.
While the first time she shoots her son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) is an accident, it's clearly intentional when she proceeds to pepper him with bullets.
So what exactly is going on? Cronenberg appears to be exploring the concept that we do not have a singular sense of self. While Colin denies having killed John, there's a part of him that wanted to and did. Vos simultaneously wants to kill and protect her husband and son.
More than this, the self Vos presents at the opening of the film is revealed to be a veneer or a mask, as literalised in one of the film's most visually arresting sequences when Colin squeezes Vos's head only for it to deflate into a mask which he then wears.
The scene also complicates the straightforward idea that Vos is 'possessing' Colin. Up that point we thought she had been wearing his body as a mask, but in some ways he is also wearing her this way, using her to act out his own violent impulses.
The reason Vos was rehearsing greeting her husband, a motif revisited later on, is not that she was trying to recall her authentic self, but putting on a mask to play the role of who she thinks she should be.
Many critics have concluded the film's climax sees Vos embrace a more authentic self, defined by the OTT violence she wreaks on her victims beyond the requirements of her job. Yet Vos's authentic self is in some ways a negation of selfhood altogether.
When she no longer says she feels guilty for killing the butterfly in Girder's debriefing, not only is she displaying a loss of empathy compared with the start of the film, she has also lost that glimmer of selfhood, the guilt seeming to offer a glimpse of who she truly is beyond the neutral recollection of memories.
Vos's arrival at a more authentic self is to realise she is no one. We all are no one - reduced to the otherwordly skin mask Colin dons, our 'true' self only a box of neutral memories with no defining personality, moral sensibilites or character.
Possessor is available on VOD in the UK and US.
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