Brandon Cronenberg’s second film puts an assassin inside a stranger’s body and watches the two of them fight for the steering wheel. It is cold, violent, handsomely shot and sharper about surveillance than about people. Worth your evening if you have the stomach.
Brandon Cronenberg’s second film is colder, cleaner and more frightening than his first, Antiviral (2012). Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) kills for hire from a chair miles away: a company run by Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wires her mind into a stranger’s body, she does the murder wearing their face, and the plan is that the host then puts a gun to their own head and Vos wakes up back at the company. Her new job is Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), engaged to Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton), whose father John Parse (Sean Bean) runs a data company. Colin does not go quietly. The film is well made, hard to watch and sharp about surveillance, and we recommend it, warning you now about the violence.
Karim Hussain shoots it in deep red and chemical blue, and the transfer sequences look as if they were done in front of the camera rather than inside one. A wax head with Riseborough’s face softens and runs; Abbott’s features push up through hers like a face through a sheet. Jim Williams’s score is synthesisers that drone for a long time and then stab. Rupert Lazarus’s production design keeps Girder’s premises white, bare and medical, and gives the Parse house glass, hard surfaces and nothing out of place.
The film’s sharpest idea is Colin’s job. He works for his future father-in-law in a dim open-plan office of people in headphones, looking through strangers’ webcams and logging the make and colour of their curtains, which the company sells on. Nobody there finds this odd. Vos, inside Colin, has to do the work well enough to pass, and we watched her try with a dread that nothing bloodier in the film matched. It is also the one place Cronenberg lets himself be funny, and we wished he had stayed longer.
Riseborough plays Vos grey and withdrawn, a woman who stands outside her own front door rehearsing what she will say to her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) before she can go in. Abbott has the harder job: he is Colin, then Vos doing a poor impression of Colin, then both at once, and he marks the changes with a half-second’s wrongness in the eyes. Sean Bean enjoys himself as a rich man who is rude for sport. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Girder speaks to Vos the way a good manager speaks to a valued employee who is about to be let go.
The violence is frank. The opening killing, which Holly (Gabrielle Graham) carries out at a party with a knife, is shown close, and Cronenberg holds the shot several seconds past where most directors would cut. We flinched, and we do not flinch easily. The 18 certificate is not a formality. Later set pieces are harder still, and we will not describe them, except to say that the film does things to a face we had not seen done before.
What the film lacks is a person at its centre, which is partly the point and partly a fault. Cronenberg wants us to ask how much of Vos is left after years of this, but he gives Michael and Ira perhaps six minutes between them, so there is nothing to measure her against. The last half hour drifts into pictures: faces laid over faces, strobing, a great deal of red. Some are remarkable; the story stops while we look at them. Matthew Hannam’s editing, tight and clear for the first hour, goes slack here. A few critics found it empty; we understand the complaint without sharing it.
Cronenberg does not run from the comparison with his father: there are cables going into skulls and a company that owns your flesh, and anyone who has seen Videodrome will nod. But the closer relative is the corporate thriller. The best material is about work, about clocking in each morning as somebody else and being judged on how well you pass, and that part is his own. It is a more disciplined film than Antiviral and a much more frightening one.
Watch it with the lights off and nobody squeamish on the sofa, and do not expect to feel better afterwards. It runs 103 minutes and does not need one more.
