Holly Bergman, one of a number of hostesses at an upmarket social function, takes a large knife and repeatedly stabs Elio Hotzer, a high-profile attorney, the guests fleeing as Holly stops and puts a pistol in her mouth but is unable to pull the trigger, but when the Police arrive she turns the gun on them and is shot dead.

In a dark, minimalist facility, Tasya Vos decouples from a machine, getting out of a large headpiece and getting off the surgical table on which she was lying. She is an agent for a covert organisation which, catering to high-paying clients, uses brain-implant technology to inhabit other people’s bodies and minds, controlling them to commit bespoke contract assassinations then killing themselves as the neural link is terminated.

That evening she visits her husband, Colin, and her young son, Ira, she being estranged from Colin, who has no idea of her line of work.

The following day Girder, Tas’ project controller, informs her of her next job, to kill John Parse, the owner of the colossal data-mining company Zoothroo, the plan being to kill both Parse, a famously coldly ruthless and aggressive businessman, and his daughter, Ava. Tas will inhabit the body of Colin Tate, Ava’s fiancee, who her father despises, and works in a low-ranked job at his company, spying on people by hacking into their webcams and making notes on their decor and consumer choices and lifestyles, valuable information to corporations and multi-nationals. The killings will be carried out at a cocktail party at Parse’s palatial home. The client is Reid, Parse’s stepson, who wants both of them dead so that he can take over the company. Girder plans to hijack the company herself by blackmailing Reid after the job is completed.

Tas stakes out Colin, following him, studying his mannerisms and speech patterns. He is abducted by the company and has a neural implant inserted. Tas enters the immersion process and awakes in Colin’s body. Controlling Colin’s body for three days she learns how much Ava despises her own father, and meets several of her friends, including Reeta, who she discovers has been having an on / off affair with Colin. Going to work at Zoothroo, Tas realises how demeaning the work is, and how low-ranked Colin is.

Attending the party, she also finds that the stories of Parse are true, cruelly insulting Colin in front of Ava and the other guests. With the plan being to have Colin start a fight and get ejected from the house, returning later to kill them both, Tas has Colin drunkenly demand an apology from Parse, then try to attack him, resulting in him being thrown out and beaten by Parse’s thugs. Waiting outside until the last guests have left. Tas / Colin re-enters the building, armed with a company-issued pistol. He confronts a drunk Parse, who dismisses him and tries to walk away, but instead of shooting him, Tas / Colin takes a poker from the ornamental fireplace and savagely batters Parce, forcing him to the ground and shattering his skull with repeated blows. When Ava appears, having heard the disturbance, Colin shoots her, she managing to stagger away, badly wounded, before collapsing, Colin standing over her to shoot her in the head. Colin puts the gun in his mouth but seems unable to pull the trigger, as Tas starts to vomit blood and the technicians say that Colin has reasserted control but instead of disconnecting her Girder orders them to give Tas more time to retake control over her host, but then the mission spirals horrifically out of control…

When Brandon Cronenberg, the son of the peerless David, made his directorial debut with 2012’s Antiviral, it was said that should one chop off the credits and show the film to an audience they would say it was undeniably a Cronenberg film, which may feel like damning the film with faint praise but also indicates the thematic and stylistic similarities, and also underrates Cronenberg Junior’s excellent and deeply uncomfortable debut (and we’ll call them BC and DC from here on, it’s easier).

He has admitted that he hadn’t intended that it would be eight years between his debut and his second film, Possessor, with other projects falling through for various reasons, but the interval allowed him to work on the script, the cinematic and visual techniques and the mostly practical special effects and prosthetic work, carried out in front of the camera with the minimum of CGI, and the result is a genuinely startling and borderline disturbing piece of work, with certain aspects harking back to his father’s also underrated eXistenZ (’99), even down to the return casting of Jennifer Jason Leigh as the impassive and calculating Girler, the controller of Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough – Oblivion / The Death Of Stalin), an ‘agent’ who through a neural link, ‘possesses’ an innocent host body and uses them to commit commissioned assassinations, then having the host body commit suicide as the neural line is broken.

With definite echoes of his father’s work, the stark, minimalist sets of the the organisation’s neurotransfer suite and the often cold, white interiors of apartments hark back to such early DC works as Crimes Of The Future (’70), as are the bizarre character names such as Elio Hotzer, Tasya Vos and Alex Boyko, where ‘Colin Tate’ stands out by being so ‘normal’, and the scenes where Colin wanders through the streets of the city after the graphic murders he has unwittingly carried out definitely remind one of the lost and wandering Cameron Vale, Stephen Lack’s character in Scanners (’81). There is also some strange, deliberately uncomfortable dialogue, Girder calling Tas her ‘Star performer’, referring to ‘This performance’ and even mentioning ‘You seem so deformed these days’. Things are not good in Tas’ personal life, being estranged but still in contact with her oblivious husband (Rossif Sutherland – Hellions / TV’s Reign) and young son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot), who have not idea of her actual line of work, which all seem to contribute to the impending disaster which is looming.

While DC was known as the King of Body Horror, eXistenZ was actually the last DC film to indulge in the visceral and corporeal fascination which made him and his films notorious, having since produced such varied work as the brutal Spider (’02), A History Of Violence (’05) and the terrific Eastern Promises (’07), the unappreciated A Dangerous Method (’11) and the ambitious Cosmopolis (’12). With Possessor, BC refocuses that gaze by making the film more viscerally and physically violent than almost any of his father’s works. The killings are utterly ruthless, the (well deserved) battering of Bean’s John Pense being remorseless, and the director also seems to want to take the audience one step further at various stages, adding a sadistic enucleation (do not look that up on Google Images) at one point just to make the viewer squirm a touch more, and the finale is admirably grim and coldly vicious. There are also a couple of unexpectedly explicit sexual scenes which also go beyond anything in a DC project, so much so US distributors Neon gave the pic a unrated release as Possessor: Uncut in the arthouse cinemas which would play such a film, not passed by the MPAA, the R-rated version, playing in other markets, having considerable cuts to several scenes of violence, sex and general ‘Cronenbergian’ imagery, while the version playing in the UK, and it’s native Canada, is the complete, uncompromising cut.

Laden with quite remarkable visuals, from Parse’s luxurious Palazzo to the extraordinary surreal scenes of Vos and Tate struggling for control of the other in a neuro-battlefield, all the more striking for being in-camera on-stage special effects, shot by the excellent DoP Karim Hussein (full disclosure – we know him and he’s a terrific bloke), Possessor, anchored by the terrific performances of Riseborough and Jason-Leigh, is an onslaught on the senses but also knows that there needs to be intelligence behind the slaughter, and the conclusion is fittingly crushing and cold.

Brandon Cronenberg may inevitably be carrying the legacy of the Cronenberg canon, but Possessor shows a true and incredibly vivid and distinctive talent in his own right, and his next feature simply cannot not come quick enough.