Possessor-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: Tasya works as an assassin for a secret organization that uses brain implant technology. But Tasya soon finds herself losing control of herself on one of her assignments. 

There have been plenty of horror movies over the years with possession as a basic premise. In such movies, a child (usually a girl) is possessed by an evil spirit who wants to create chaos in the world. Movies like that usually ended with a long exorcism sequence where a lot of people died before the evil spirit was vanquished. And then just to add some spice to the movie, the final scene would show the evil spirit still lurking around.

Possessor is something like that. In this, for the first time, you’ll see science take inspiration from horror movies to create a procedure that will enable people to take control of the minds of others and make them do evil stuff. In this case, the evil stuff is assassinations of high profile people.

POSSESSOR Movie Plot 

The movie begins with a woman called Holly who is dressing up to go somewhere. She is anguished by something and weeps before inserting a cable inside her head.

The next minute, she’s all dressed up in a waitress uniform and barely pays attention to the instructions she’s receiving. She has already received her instructions.

At the party in the hotel where she is waitressing, she walks right up to a man and stabs him in the throat. The guests are shocked and flee. Holly relishes the blood flowing from the man’s neck. She’s fascinated by it. The next minute she knows what she must do but hesitates. She puts a gun in her mouth but is unable to press the trigger. There’s a brief second where she is filled with anxiety and you know it is because she is unable to follow the instructions she must have received.

Luckily the police arrive and she aims the gun at them prompting them to fill her with bullets.

In another place, Tasya Vos awakens and gasps, then vomits. Turns out she was the one controlling Holly’s mind and is an assassin. Her controller Girder is pleased with her performance and sympathetic to the after-effects.

Vos is shown a box of weird trinkets that she must recognize. She manages to recognize her grandfather’s pipe whom she never met, and a butterfly in a frame that she killed when she was a girl and felt guilty about. The last is an odd silver glass that she knows doesn’t belong to her.

Girder is happy that she is fully there but annoyed when Vos asks for a break from her assignments because her husband told her so. Girder doesn’t appreciate her employees having families that distract them from making money so quickly reminds her that she has separated from her husband Michael.

Vos says she knows that but that they still talk. Why can’t she have a friendly relationship with the man whom she has a child with? In this case, she has a son called Ira. She hides her relationship status from her boss because the job probably requires people not to have families or care about them if they happen to have one.

Vos goes to meet Michael but has to rehearse her dialogues showing that she probably isn’t completely there considering she has to keep jumping from one host to another.

She greets her husband and son with the dialogues she has rehearsed. Later at night, she grows intimate with Michael but isn’t satisfied because the next thing we see her do is to beg for another assignment rather than suffer Michael’s tedious company.

Girder introduces her to her next case wherein she must take down the CEO of an IT company called Zoothro. She has to take over a man’s mind called Colin who is dating the boss’ daughter Ava.

Vos is ready to take on the case but Girder reminds her she must follow the instructions to a T. Apparently in her last case, she was supposed to shoot the lawyer rather than stab him. Vos clearly has a fascination for bloody messes and Girder is seen being apprehensive about it since Vos is her star employee.

Is there anyone else who is doing what Vos is? Because we don’t see them and it is understandable why Girder takes great pains for h patronizing Vos.

Vos sets about to do a recon and spy on Colin and get his speech and mannerisms right.

The real Colin is intercepted on the way to the airport and brought to the facility to have his brain poked.

Vos gets into his conscience and we see a lot of seizure-inducing images and lights. And then there is a sequence where Vos is shown to be melting and integrating with Colin.

As soon as Vos takes over Colin, the first thing she does is check herself out. She’s in a man’s body after all and has some hidden urges that Michael couldn’t satisfy. But she gathers herself up quickly after admiring herself in the mirror and goes to meet Ava who immediately says that Colin is acting strange.

Vos was apparently not supposed to be so kind or romantic to Ava. An excuse is mumbled and Colin is on his way to work. His job is at the mine where he must look and comment on curtains and Venetian blinds. He is quickly distracted by a couple making love and is reprimanded by the supervisor.

Vos clearly has a lot of hidden desires that haven’t been satisfied.

Colin then takes a walk around town and clearly, Vos is having trouble taking complete control of him. He finally goes home and finds Ava has invited all her obnoxious friends. One of them, Reeta, is someone Colin probably already had an affair with. She tells him that Ava doesn’t mind if they meet up again. He jumps into making plans with her.

Later, Ava tells Colin sorry for her weird friends in the only way she can but Colin is still having trouble focusing.

POSSESSOR Ending Explained with Spoilers! 

The day arrives when Colin/Vos is instructed to take down the CEO. Ava takes Colin to meet her father who belittles him publicly. Clearly, Colin has enough frustrations of his own. It doesn’t matter that Ava also doesn’t appreciate her father’s boorish behaviour and is supportive of Colin. He hates being humiliated in public.

So when he is finally in place and instructed to take down his target, he happily uses a fire poker to do it. Again, Vos doesn’t use a gun. She has a thing for blood and violence probably because she never fully recovers from the procedure or because when she was a little girl and killed that butterfly, she hid the fact that she actually enjoyed killing a small, helpless creature.

Either way, Vos bashes her target with the poker and then stabs him right through the mouth. Ava rushes in, aghast at the sight. She runs but Colin finally uses the gun to put a few bullets in her.

But he isn’t done yet. He follows her and watches her struggling to crawl and reach the telephone to call for help. He’s enjoying that for some reason and then caresses her face one last time before putting a bullet right through her head.

His next step should be putting a bullet through his head but Colin fails miserably at that again. Vos doesn’t allow herself to do it. Perhaps it is because she enjoys the kills more than she cares to admit and wants to continue.

Her instability being in Colin causes problems and the latter becomes dominant. He goes to Reeta who invites him inside with pleasure. But Vos wants to kill or perhaps Colin does, that part isn’t clarified. Vos does enjoy killing but now that Colin is dominant, is he unable to control his sadistic desires?

He doesn’t realize it and there’s a lot of back and forth between him and Vos who sees in his thoughts. The next instant he wakes up to find his colleague from the company beside him. He’s a plant and he’s here to put everything right by reconnecting him to the machine and reconfiguring him.

Colin loses control of himself and wakes up to find blood all over him and his colleague laying in a pool of blood. He goes to the bathroom and sees that he had killed Reeta after all. He wants out, Vos wants control.

They go to see Michael. Vos doesn’t care for him because he’s terrible at being intimate. Or maybe she had some other agenda because Michael is the next victim.

Ira comes along and stabs Colin. He’s Girder who’s decided to take the matter in her own hands and hijacked her employee’s son. As a reflex, Colin/Vos shoots him and he dies too.

Both Vos and Girder wake up, finally escaping the terrible error in their mission.

The CEO somehow survives and we see a flash of Vos meeting him. But then Colin was elsewhere and she was somewhere else so his fate remains uncertain.

Later when Girder shows Vos the box she’s supposed to identify to make sure she is “all there”, Vos picks up the butterfly in the frame but this time doesn’t say she feels guilty for killing it.

Probably to emphasize that Vos enjoys killing people and watching their blood spill everywhere. And she feels no guilt whatsoever about her job.

The movie is surprisingly good, pacy and will keep you on the edge of the seat. What it could do without? The close-up of the needle inserting the brain, the excessive blood flowing and the flashes of images of Vos and Colin that hurts the eyes.

Scare scale: 4/5

 

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