Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Writer: Brandon Cronenberg
Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
Synopsis
In the not-too-distant future, Holly goes to a party. She picks up a knife from a table and stabs a man repeatedly unto he’s very, very, very dead. When she’s done, she doesn’t understand what happened or why she did it. She then pulls out a small pistol and the cops end up killing her.
Somewhere else, a woman wakes up and takes a helmet off. Her name is Tasya Vos, and she was possessing Holly to kill that man. She then has to identify some personal items to prove that she is really herself. “No false psyche,” states the examiner. “Any anomalies during interface?” She asks. “No,” Vos responds. “Our next contract is almost finalized, and it’s a big one,” says the examiner, Girder.
She goes to visit Michael, her husband, but they are currently separated. She’s preoccupied with memories of her “work.” He wants her to move back in with them.
Her next job is to kill a family so the survivor inherits it all. She’s going to possess Colin, and she starts studying his speech patterns immediately. They kidnap Colin and do the implant web surgery that allows the possession. She can only stay “inside” for a maximum of three days. They turn on the machine, and she possesses Colin Tate. Tasya/Colin wakes up in a high-rise apartment next to “his” girlfriend, Eva. The plan is to kill Eva and her rich father.
Colin goes to work, but he finds it difficult to concentrate. He keeps hallucinating some kind of floating pill. Before long, he’s having a strange reaction and seizures. Something’s not quite right with the transfer this Tim, but Vos says she can keep with it. Colin provokes a fight with John Sparse, Eva’s father, and gets thrown out of the party. He’s to go back inside later and kill John. The fight was to give him motive.
He goes back inside and picks up a fireplace poker, but we see that he was supposed to use a gun. He beats John to death with the poker. When Eva comes in, he shoots her in the back. “Pull me out,” he requests. Something goes wrong with the process. He stabs himself, and we see Tasya puking up blood. Dr. Melis tells Girder that she thinks Colin may be the dominant personality in the body now; he refused to kill himself.
Eddie comes over and shoots Colin in the back. He then wired up Colin to a machine and wakes Vos up. It seems he’s an agent as well. He’s here to fix Vos up and get her back in control. During the process, we see Colin “kill” Vos and wear her face. Who is who now? When he wakes up, Eddie is dead and Colin’s covered in blood. Oops. Colin keeps trying to shoot himself in the head, but he just can’t pull the trigger.
He starts hanging out just outside Michael and Ira’s house, Tasya’s family. He ends up killing Michael. Colin/Vos kills him like twenty times over with a butcher knife, and the blood is excessive. Colin goes through many changes of clothes in this. Little Ira comes in and stabs Colin in the neck; Colin shoots Ira four times in the head. Colin bleeds out.
Elsewhere, Vos wakes up, and they take her helmet off. It turns out Girder possessed Ira to get him to kill Colin. Next, we see Vox identifying the same objects from the previous examination…
Commentary
The visuals when she possesses Colin are fascinating. It’s like she’s a wax figure that melts, and then reconstitutes as him; a neat effect. The gore is pretty cringeworthy, with a popped eye and a fireplace poker to the head.
The acting in this one didn’t impress me. Christopher Abbott as Colin Tate walked around as if he were lost the whole time. That fit the character, but it wasn’t that interesting. Also, he looks like a bargain-version of Kit Harrington. We don’t really see enough of Tasya Vos as herself to care about what happens to her, and we don’t really get to know the real Colin either, so it’s actually hard to care about any of the characters.
Still, it’s got some fascinating ideas and concepts. What if you could take over someone else for a few days?