With its grisly images of physical transference and its sharp, if deeply fatalistic, view of human independence, Possessor may be the smartest scary movie of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2024

Believe the hype: Possessor is as good, if not better, than you've heard

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 10, 2021

Cronenberg by name, Cronenberg by nature.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2021

Bodily betrayals marry tech conspiracy theories in this unnerving second feature from Brandon Cronenberg.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2021

It's pure cinematic dysmorphia: to watch this movie carefully is to feel completely out of place, right alongside the people onscreen.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 16, 2021

Possessor's genuinely horrific, stroboscopic imagery suggests a filmmaker wrestling with a family legacy but also coming into his own.

| Jan 27, 2021

That red butterfly captures the little bit of herself that Vos loses with every job as she becomes something else, and Possessor: Uncut makes you wonder: What the hell is she turning into?

| Dec 7, 2020

Cronenberg isn't just looking to provoke with blood and guts -- like all good dystopian fiction, Possessor offers disturbing and timely observations about the world we already live in.

| Dec 3, 2020

An entertaining techno thriller... led by actors whose mere presence does the leg work whenever Cronenberg's script falters.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 1, 2020

Possessor feels both fresh and tense and full of surprising twists and turns. It successfully explores our experiences with modern anxieties and how we deal with them.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 30, 2020

A tale of cyber-surveillance and physical transference that taps into timely fears while also addressing age-old issues of identity, alienation and being an impostor in your own life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2020

It's a tough watch, but also brilliantly unsettling in its depiction of Vos's breakdown and the questions it asks about the malleability of human identity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 29, 2020

we are invited not just to locate our own vicarious thrills in all [protagonist Tasya's] deeply transgressive acts, but also to ask what, in adopting and exploiting these identities, Tasya, and we with her, might be losing.

| Nov 26, 2020

Possessor is, above all, an ultra-violent sci-fi-horror freak-out that will probably have you hiding your face in your hands. (That's what I did.)

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 26, 2020

Steeped in big ideas and gallons of artificial haemoglobin, Possessor is a messy cinematic journey that leaves some of the dot-connecting to you.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 26, 2020

A beautiful nightmare that it's hard to wake up from.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 23, 2020

The overall effect is stark. Beneath the film's body-snatching concept and cool, neon glow is a savagely nihilistic vision of human exploitation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2020

It's something to see even when you're watching through your fingers, but the film's big, beguiling ideas never get satisfyingly developed, and the ending is a shocker that doesn't resonate very far past the end credits.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2020

It's a disturbing head trip that is as savage as it is thought-provoking. It's also expertly made.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2020

Excellent in this movie is Jennifer Jason Leigh as the organizational spymaster -- She's so creepy!

| Oct 10, 2020