Corporate espionage has never been more dangerous or prescient than in Brandon Cronenberg’s sophomore feature Possessor, a film that explores the meaning of free will and the price we pay for having technology. It’s a deeply meditative film about who’s in control and murky capitalistic corporations who operate in the shadows, puppeteering companies and wealth and unfortunate bystanders. It’s an achievement in body horror and a low-fi approach to themes explored in the cyberpunk genre but feels startling real and of the time.

It opens with a woman named Holly (Gabrielle Graham) inserting a needle-like electrode into her head while waves of emotions pass over his face. Happiness. Anger. Fear. Sadness. She seemingly experiences all of the emotions until her face becomes as serene as a calm ocean, hiding the depths of her intentions. As she walks through gorgeously opulent and geometric halls that simultaneously feel ultra modern and retro chic, she bee lines it to a greasy man in charge and jabs a knife into his throat. Not content with the large spurt of blood that sends the ritzy crowd running and screaming, she stabs him again. And again. And again. Over and over, covering his chest and belly with knife marks that ooze and spurt like a punctured ketchup bottle.

When she’s satisfied that the corpse is more holes than body, she grabs a gun out of her purse, tells some unseen person, “pull me out” and places the gun in her mouth. But she’s unable to pull the trigger and is eventually gunned down by the police. Somewhere across the city, a woman named Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) wakes up from a retro-futuristic hyperbaric chamber and vomits into an awaiting bucket. She had been controlling Holly in an event that was manufactured like a movie set by the shadowy company she works for. Her never-named company is involved in corporate espionage of the most insidious kind, using body-hopping assassins to kill CEOs and other powerful individuals for profit.

But the puppeteering comes at a cost and as Vos goes through a debriefing with her superior Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), she has to be reminded of her separation from her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) as she goes through a small box of keepsakes. Each time she goes under, it seems to take a part of her and while Girder wonders why Vos didn’t use the gun in Holly’s purse instead of the knife, it seems evident that something isn’t right. But Vos goes back in, this time inhabiting the body of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) in order to assassinate the CEO of a powerful datamining company in a murder-suicide that will give control of the company to one of the CEO’s children.

With only three days to give the appearance that Colin has lost his mind before going on a murder spree that ends in his death, Vos finds herself struggling for control of the host’s body...and then things get weird.

Possessor relies on our understanding of sci-fi narratives to do the most heavy-lifting in the story department. Pulling together imagery and themes explored in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, it envisions a retro-futuristic world (set in 2008, if you’re counting) where dubious and nefarious companies do backroom deals by jacking into the bodies of the unfortunates. We’ve seen similar stories and writer/director Brandon Cronenberg knows this so he doesn’t waste much time on establishing the shadowy company that our main character works for. The motives are downright capitalistic and that’s all you need to know.

Instead, the film imagines a world where everyone is interested in some form of puppetry and control, from the top of shadowy organizations down to even children. In a throwaway scene where Tasya spends a brief moment with her son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) before taking on her next task, Ira eagerly shows his mother a simple program he created to control an uncanny mechanical puppet. “I can make it dance,” he says with a glint in his eye. With a few keystrokes he makes it dance a creepy, robotic dance, its face immovable and eyeless; a mask that barely covers the mechanical gears underneath that gives the doll an uncanny valley creepiness.

Her target Colin Tate, likewise is involved in a different kind of puppetry at his job with datamining company Zoothroo. Every day, he jacks into cameras in phones and laptops and other devices to spy on people at their most unarmed to determine what kinds of blinds and drapes they’ve purchased. He sees people engaging in private moments of intimacy with each other, but he’s more interested in datamining their purchases; what kinds of blinds and drapes they’re using, for example. And of course there’s the company Tasya works for that literally commandeers people’s bodies to force them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Corporate espionage and Corporate manslaughter taken to the extremes. But even here, the company is less interested in the people it uses than what it can gain. It’s another form of datamining that ignores the human cost as the company knows that by taking out the Zoothroo’s CEO John Parse (Sean Bean), they will have the new CEO in their pocket. Another puppet to add to the shelf.

But all of this is grounded in fantastic performances by Christopher Abbott and Andrea Riseborough and their battle over Colin’s body. Abbott has become quite an intriguing actor to watch and here he’s allowed to explore his body and the idea of playing someone...playing him. Their struggle leads to some of the best moments of the film as the two, in surreal sequences filmed in bright reds, try to exert control. One of my favorite moments, shown in the poster, is when Colin puts a haggard mask of Tasya over his face in a sequence that brings to mind Ira playing with the mechanical puppet with its uncanny plastic face.

Aside from the cringe-worthy practical effects, the copious amount of gushing red and the sci-fi conceits, I found myself most intrigued with Tasya than anything else. Cronenberg has created a fascinating character in Tasya Vos and the narrative explores whether she’s a person that’s lost all sense of humanity…or whether she had any humanity to begin with. When she’s not jacked into another person’s body, she seems like an empty shell herself. A vessel that’s been used by her corporation to the point she doesn’t feel real.

One of the more quietly haunting moments is her standing outside her estranged husband’s house, practicing her lines and her delivery. Working on how she’ll say it; the right tone, the right inflection. It’s all playacting and when she grabs her son in some facsimile of a motherly hug with a perfectly intoned, “hi, darling!”, it’s enough to send shivers down your spine. For all the bodily horror brutally inflicted on the people in Possessor, it’s the horrors of the mind and the implications of the shockingly violent finale that have continued to linger and fester in my mind.

A fascinating mix of body (and mental) horror that explores the dynamics of power and free will, Possessor is the best film I’ve seen in a long time.