It’s been quite a while since a psycho-horror flick got under my skin as effectively as this has. Honestly, it felt like I had lost my taste for the stuff, since I haven’t been as ga-ga over this genre for a while now in my reviews. But then this little number comes along, the sophomore effort from writer/director Brandon ‘Son of David’ Cronenberg, which is about as literal as it gets for a psychological horror film. Namely, that most of the truly horrifying stuff happens exclusively in the main character’s mind. Or, rather, minds.
Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) is an assassin with a different methodology than most: She hacks into another person’s consciousness, and uses them to carry out the killing. It’s mainly anchored by Riseborough’s chilling performance, as well as support from Jennifer Jason Leigh as her handler, Gabrielle Graham and Christopher Abbott as two of her hosts, and Sean Bean and Tuppence Middleton as her targets. The sci-fi tinge to the narrative is more a means to an end than anything else, showing a woman whose profession involves losing her identity on a regular basis, and needing to re-teach herself how to be herself.
These have got to be the best visual and practical effects I’ve seen all year, bar none. It has enough blood for five Blade rave scenes, and the close-ups on knives and pokers and mechanical prongs sticking into flesh are quite unsettling to see. There’s also the effects done to visualise what’s going on in Tasya’s mind, becoming glued and unglued from other minds that, through a combination of Karim Hussain’s cinematography and Matthew Hannam’s psychedelic editing, brings new meaning to ‘getting inside the head of the character’. And when one of her hosts begins to fight back, the imagery ranges from the grotesque to the dissociative to the transgendered, all of which is presented at full force and a breathless pace.
However, for as deliciously surreal as this Inception-by-way-of-The-Cell-by-way-of-Assassin’s-Creed narrative is on its own, the truly terrifying thing is only delivered by the sci-fi premise, rather than being part of it wholesale. It’s the idea that what Tasya is going through, being violently jerked between two different modes of existence that keep interfering with each other on a sub-conscious level, isn’t even science-fiction at all. It’s reality. Our reality. It’s the reality of every single person who maintains a distance between their personal lives and professional lives.
Brandon, much like his father, shows an interest in human/machine interfaces, here shown as humanity interfacing with the mechanical processes of capitalism. A system where the only thing that matters is a person’s ability to serve it, and if their priorities lie more with their loved ones than the system, than they either have to change those priorities, or be stuck without work. It’s like a violently speculative twist on Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, and while the effect is about as heartbreaking as in that film, the on-screen impact of it is kept strictly personal. We are watching someone on the verge of losing their sense of self entirely, and what makes it horrifying is that that is exactly the result Tasya’s higher-ups want.
Easily one of the wildest rides of 2020, while also carrying a distinctive slow burn that really brings the rush out of the proceedings, I am genuinely in awe of just how fully-formed this production is. The themes of dissociation and workplace priorities, the cerebral scar tissue, the viscera, the intent study of bedroom curtains; not a single blood drop is out of place here, and there’s a shit-load of them to be found, making for some of the best body horror I’ve ever sat through, period.
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