We have seen movies about assassins and we’ve seen movies about mind control but “Possessor,” the new film by Brandon Cronenberg (yes, he’s David’s son and seems to share some of his obsessions) now playing at select theatres and drive ins, mixes and matches the two in an unsettling, surreal hybrid of sci-fi and horror.
Anyone with trypanophobia—fear of needles—may want to cover their eyes during the film’s opening minutes as a young woman (Gabrielle Graham) impales herself with a long needle, right through the cranium. The needle is attached to a box with a dial. A twist of the dial and soon she is gruesomely stabbing a man in the neck, in public.
Turns out, it’s not really her brandishing the knife but a mercenary named Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), a mind control assassin who “possesses” people’s minds via brain-implant technology and forces them to do her bidding. Her handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), helps her find her way back to her own identity after sublimating herself in someone else’s brain.
Tasya’s latest gig involves parasitically getting into the mind of former cocaine dealer Colin (Christopher Abbott), a trainwreck of a man whose girlfriend Ava’s (Tuppence Middleton) father (Sean Bean) is John Parse, a high-powered executive. A rival wants Parse dead and Colin is the perfect patsy to do the deed.
From the film’s savage opening minutes through the sex and gore splattered landscape of the middle section to the climax “Possessor” is like a nightmare. Surreal visuals of Tasya and Colin as one hideous being or a severed hand unfurling its fingers are direct from night terrors, but Cronenberg takes pains to ensure that, unlike nightmares that are disconnected scenes that play in our heads, his psychodrama has depth and meaning. His highly developed visual sense—and a bloody colour palette that would make Dario Argento envious—is eye-catching and consistently interesting but it is the film’s ideas that linger like the unsettled feeling after you wake from a nightmare.
The movie’s exploration of how technology and humanity intersect is an increasingly timely question. “Possessor” takes that crossroads to a narrative extreme but Tasya and Colin’s technological melding is a terrifying vision of a future that feels like it might be right around the corner.
Cronenberg’s sophomore movie, after 2012’s “Antiviral,” is disturbing and ambitious with an icy, cerebral veneer that will linger in your mind for a long time afterward.
We all know how “First Man” will end. No surprises there. What may be surprising is the portrayal of its titular character, American astronaut and hero Neil Armstrong. It’s a small story about a giant leap.
Focussing on the years 1961 to 1968 “First Man” introduces us to Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an engineer and envelope-pushing pilot. When an X-15 test flight gives him a glimpse of space he becomes obsessed with going further. When his three-year-old daughter dies of a brain tumour he turns his grief inward, throwing himself at work. Becoming a NASA Gemini Project astronaut over the next seven years he fulfils the dream of President Kennedy 1962, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” speech. Alongside Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber), he begins a journey that will take him to the moon and back.
“First Man” is based on one of mankind’s greatest achievements and yet feels muted on the big screen. Deliberately paced, it nails the bone-rattling intensity of the early flights, the anxiety felt by the loved ones left behind as the astronauts risk everything to beat the Russians to the moon, and yet it never exactly takes flight.
Part history lesson, part simulator experience, it doesn’t deliver the characters necessary to feel like a complete experience.
Gosling is at his most restrained here as an analytical man who loves his family but is so stoic he answers his son’s question, “Do you think you’re coming back from the moon,” with an answer better suited to the boardroom than the dinner table. “We have every confidence in the mission,” he says. “There are risks but we have every reason to believe we’ll be coming back.” He is buttoned-down and yet not completely detached. His daughter’s memory never strays from his mind, even if he never discusses her death with his wife, played by an underused Claire Foy. Gosling embraces Armstrong’s fortitude but has stripped the character down to the point where he is little more than a distant man of few words.
“First Man” contains some thrilling moments but for the most part is like the man himself, stoic and understated.
Centred around a motel in a small Alaskan town, Sweet Virginia is a story of people and a place gripped by greed, frustration and murder.
“I’m originally from a small town,” says the Timmins, Ont.-born director Jamie M. Dagg, “so I’m really fascinated by how the lack of anonymity in small communities changes the dynamics and how people relate to one another where everyone is incestuously interwoven into the fabric of the community. Keeping secrets is really difficult.”
In the film, opening Friday, Christopher Abbott is Elwood, a dead-eyed psychopath who comes to town to do a job. He’s been contracted to kill a man. He does the hit, callously killing two innocent bystanders in the process. Waiting for his money, he checks into the motel run by Sam (Jon Bernthal, star of The Punisher on Netflix), a former rodeo star now sidelined by injuries. The two men strike up a friendship as Elwood grows edgy and unpredictable waiting for the person who hired him to cough up his fee… READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
Centred around a motel in a small Alaskan town, Sweet Virginia is a story of people and a place gripped by greed, frustration and murder.
“I’m originally from a small town,” says the Timmins, Ont.-born director Jamie M. Dagg, “so I’m really fascinated by how the lack of anonymity in small communities changes the dynamics and how people relate to one another where everyone is incestuously interwoven into the fabric of the community. Keeping secrets is really difficult.”
In the film, Christopher Abbott is Elwood, a dead-eyed psychopath who comes to town to do a job. He’s been hired by Lila (Imogen Poots) to kill her cheating husband. He does the hit, callously killing two innocent bystanders in the process.
Waiting for his money, he checks into the motel run by Sam (Jon Bernthal), a former rodeo star now sidelined by injuries. The two men strike up a friendship as Elwood grows edgy and unpredictable waiting for Lila to cough up his fee.
“These are communities where the ramifications of misdeeds are dramatically amplified,” says Dagg. “It often ripples across the entire population.”
Dagg, whose first film, River, won the 2016 Canadian Screen Award for best first feature, says the first actor to sign on for Sweet Virginia was Abbott. Best known for playing Marnie’s ex-boyfriend Charlie on the HBO comedy-drama series Girls, Abbott didn’t immediately seem like a good fit to play a cold-blooded killer.
“Then I watched (the movie) James White with Cynthia Nixon,” Dagg says, picking up the story. “He has incredible range. Both of us had issues with this guy being (as was originally written) a really charismatic, cool cowboy. We were both interested in pushing it into the person who was bullied in high school but could be the next Columbine shooter.”
The character is a viper, a deadly man with no remorse. Imagine No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh and you get the idea.
“I decided and Jamie agreed that Elwood is a character who inherently despises humans,” says Abbott. “It was challenging in making sure to avoid clichés. There are a lot of very good, very credible performances out there of quote-unquote ‘villains’. I found it challenging to respect the lineage of playing villains while trying to do my own thing with it.”
Abbott says he’s been inadvertently researching this role for years.
“I read books on psychology,” he says, “even books like The Psychopath Test. I used something I read in that book for this part. It is part of my job as an actor that, no matter how bad a character is, is to justify or feel sorry for him. That’s the fun of it. How do you have a soft spot for a murderous psychopath?”
Sweet Virginia takes place against a backdrop of duplicity and dread but Abbott says bringing this story of menace to the screen was relatively trouble free.
“Jamie created an atmosphere where we were able to play as actors,” says the actor, “and he really enjoyed watching us, which gave us confidence to go further and do more. It was a nice marriage that way.”
Dagg concurs. “My first film, River, was a challenging film to make. This film was sort of easy. The next one is probably going to be hell! These things are not supposed to be this easy.”
Centred around a motel in a small Alaskan town, “Sweet Virginia” is a story of place and people gripped by greed, frustration and murder.
Christopher Abbott is Elwood, a dead-eyed psychopath who comes to town to do a job. He’s been hired by Lila (Imogen Poots) to kill her cheating husband Mitchell (). He does the hit, callously killing two innocent bystanders in the process. Waiting for his money he checks into the motel run by Sam (Jon Bernthal), a former rodeo star now sidelined by injuries. The two men strike up a friendship as Elwood grows edgy and unpredictable waiting for Lila to cough up his fee.
“Sweet Virginia” is a tense and tawdry neo-noir about people on the edge. Much is left unsaid by characters whose life histories are hinted at but never explained. Sam’s limp and shaking hand suggest trauma, Elwood’s rage is illuminated in a one sided phone to his mother while Lila remains a mystery, a small town cipher. Bernthal and Poots perform with understated grace. Abbott is a coiled spring but with enough moments of humanity to prevent becoming a stereotype.
Director Jamie M. Dagg builds atmosphere all the way through. The tiny town and the twin senses of isolation and desperation bring all the story elements together to a slow boil. There is some action but this is a character study, not a police procedural or even a morality play. It’s part “Double Indemnity,” part “Blood Simple,” taking place in treacherous shadows with very little light.
“Sweet Virginia” takes place against a backdrop of duplicity and dread as Dagg maintains an air of menace that keeps things interesting.
From director Jamie M. Dagg: “Sweet Virginia” is being released on Friday December 1 through Elevation Pictures in Canada on iTunes etc. It will also be screening in the following theatres for a week.
If you would like to listen to me blather on about the film, I will be doing a Q & A in Toronto with Richard Crouse after the 7:00pm screening on Saturday Dec 2nd:-) That’s this Saturday. Thanks!
There are so many dystopian stories out there it sometimes feels like the movies just might produce dark visions of our planet until the end of the world comes for real. The latest film to portray the end of times is “It Comes At Night,” a psychological horror film starring Joel Edgerton and Riley Keough.
Set in the aftermath of some sort of cataclysmic plague that wiped out much of the population, the story follows a family of gas mask wearing survivors. Paranoid “You can’t trust anyone but family” father Paul (Edgerton), steely mother Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and 17-year-old Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) live in a secluded cabin fortified with boarded windows. Barricaded in, with only two double-locked doors and an airlock separating them from the dangers of the outside, infected world.
Their quiet home life is turned inside out when an intruder named Will (Christopher Abbott) breaches their security. The young man tells Paul that his wife and son (Keough and Griffin Robert Faulkner) are just fifteen miles away, dying. “You’re a good person,” says Will, “just trying to protect your family but don’t let mine die because of it.” Moved, Paul agrees to help. The two men brave the uncertain and dangerous journey to Will’s home, rescuing Will’s wife and son. When the two families move in under one roof small cracks soon become chasms that lead to paranoia and suspicion.
“It Comes at Night” is a study in angst, claustrophobia and fear. It’s an up-close-and-personal look at the way society reacts in times of crisis, a lantern-lit look at survival. An existential horror film in shading and feel, the real terror here comes from the characters and not the unnamed virus that decimated mankind. Like “Night of the Living Dead” it is a look at the paranoia and fear that comes along with a societal collapse.
Instead of going for jump scares or outright horror director Trey Edward Shults uses an anxiety-inducing soundtrack to slowly build an atmosphere of dread. Concentrating on the hopelessness of the situation he supplies an emotional punch that plays like a kick to the stomach. It’s disturbing—there hardly a moment of uplift to be found anywhere here—but at a brisk ninety minutes its harrowing story never outstays its welcome. Whatever state your life is in, you’ll be glad to return to it after the end credits.
