SELF OBSESSION

WHO’S WHO? “WE’RE ALL HACKABLE RIGHT NOW,” SAYS BRANDON CRONENBERG, DIRECTOR OF BRUTAL BODY SNATCH HORROR POSSESSOR

- NICK SETCHFIELD

CAN YOU REPEAT THAT AGAIN?” asks Brandon Cronenberg, on the line to SFX from his home city of Toronto. He’s all apologies, clearly squirming as he requests a third stab at the same question. “I’m sorry. There’s this intense static that coming through.

“Maybe we’re being hacked,” he laughs, through the curse of crackle. “Maybe they don’t want this information out there…”

It feels entirely appropriate that technology is against us today. Cronenberg’s new movie, Possessor, is a tech-driven fantasy, blurring the boundaries of horror and thriller just as the identities of its protagonists shift and melt to disturbing effect. In this story the self is a brittle, untrustworthy thing and, as the writer-director tells it, that’s a premise rooted in his own lived experience.

“I was on the press tour for my first feature, Antiviral,” Cronenberg recalls, as the static mercifully recedes. “And when you travel with a film for the first time it’s a bit of a surreal experience because you’re kind of building a public persona for the first time. You’re really performing another version of yourself that goes off and has its own weird life online without you.

“I was, in a sense, having difficulty seeing myself in my own life. I was waking up in the morning, feeling that I was sitting up in someone else’s life, and having to scramble to construct some kind of character who could operate in that context. So initially I wanted to write a script about a character who may or may not be an imposter in their own life, and use that as a way to talk about how we build characters as narratives in order to operate as people. And the sci-fi thriller elements actually came out of that.”