Possessor

A good test of our new TV is the film Possessor which is streamed from Broadway Cinema via Modern Films. It is directed by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon and it certainly shows influences of his father’s work.

Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is employed by a company that offers remote assassinations. Basically they kidnap and drug someone who has access to the person they want to get rid of, imped a microchip in their skull and then allow one of their staff to take control of their mind and body via super-bluetooth (or something). Just like a computer game.

Tasya is the company’s top assassin but she's been working too hard and needs a break from her job. Too many long hours, killed too many people, you know how it is and she’s begun losing touch with own life. She’s so used to being other people, she has to rehearse being herself before she goes home at nights to her husband and son. She isn’t going to get a break though because her boss (Jennifer Jason Leigh) needs her for the biggest job the Company has ever had.

Her next job to take out John Parse (Sean Bean), the CEO of some mega company, along with his daughter Ava (Tuppence Middleton) using her boyfriend Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) as the weapon of choice, making it look like some massive mental breakdown on Colin’s part. This is at the request of Ava’s step-brother who would gain by inheriting the business.

The assassination is only a partial success as Colin seems resistant to being fully taken over. Ava is killed but Parse escapes. When Tasya attempts to cut her losses and flee by forcing Colin to shoot himself she finds that she can’t make him do it.

Meanwhile a shocked Colin cannot understand why he’s killed his girlfriend or why he is suddenly getting memories of another person life, that of Tasya’s. Confused, he kills a friend of his before tracking down Tasya’s family and confronting her husband at gunpoint, demanding answers he isn't going to get.

Personally, I was disappointed that the film drifted off its more straightforward assassination plot line and into everyone’s weakening grip on reality. Something which vastly accelerated the body count and where it’s not always entirely clear what is going on and who was in control of who.

Make Up

I rent a British film called Make Up that was made in Cornwall through BFI Player and Broadway Cinema.

Young Ruth (Molly Windsor) get more than she bargained for when arrives at a windswept caravan park in St Ives as the season draws to a close. Her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn) works there and the caravan park's manager Shirley (Lisa Palfrey) takes Ruth on as well to assist with the winter maintenance. 

Although initially pleased to be with her boyfriend, things start to go wrong for Ruth when she finds strands of red hair in their bed and lipstick on the caravan’s mirror. With Tom regularly disappearing for long periods, supposedly working, she suspects he is having an affair but she doesn’t know anyone with long red hair. Let alone someone who is seriously moulting. Perhaps he’s secretly hiding a Red Setter or an Afghan hound? When she goes for a shower and hears someone having sex in the next stall, she suspects it's him and his mystery woman. 

With Ruth also seeing things around the park, like things inside caravans that are supposed to be empty, and also confessing she is scared of the sea and cannot swim, there is a sense that something awful is about to happen.

What does happen is she finds a friend in Jade (Stefanie Martini), who is a fellow park resident, and who offers Ruth a makeover. Ruth doesn’t suspect Jade of having designs on Tom but quickly realises that she might have designs on her but initially she’s far from keen.

As the film goes on she cures herself of her fear of the sea and having convinced herself that her boyfriend is cheating on her, cures herself of any qualms she may have had about indulging in a spot of cheating on him with another woman.

It’s an odd film, a relationship drama but one where we never really get to know the main character so never really understand her insecurities or for that matter are convinced enough by her relationship with her boyfriend to care if she runs off with someone else, male or female.

Its plus point is its wonderful atmospheric setting of an out of season caravan park with its motley collection of residents.