Category: reason

Possessor is a world-class body horror movie that has no idea when enough is enough, and no interest in finding out.  Although much of the film is characterized by an eerie stillness and a distinctive sense of hovering dread, there are also episodes of ferocious, bloody violence, and one sex scene of a tumescent nature not usually found outside the overheated alleyways of porn. (This is in the unrated version of the film that’s currently playing in theatres and drive-ins; an R-rated version is being readied for later on-demand viewing.)

The writer and director, Brandon Cronenberg, is the son of David Cronenberg, past master of icky ideas and disturbing imagery, and Possessor echoes some of the dank gloom of his 1983 Videodrome. But Brandon has creep-out skills of his own, and he’s brought them to bear intensely on this madly complex puzzle-film.

Andrea Riseborough (Nicolas Cage’s doomed girlfriend in Mandy) is Taya Vos, a woman with a husband, a son, and a side job as a brain-burrowing corporate assassin. Her work requires the cranial implantation of a cyber worm that allows her to take over the body of a designated target. For example, her latest assignment, overseen by an agent-handler named Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), requires her to meld with the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbot), boyfriend of Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton), who is the daughter of obnoxious tech mogul John Parse (Sean Bean). Taya’s assassination bureau has been hired by Reid Parse (Christopher Jacot), John’s disgruntled stepson, to murder John and Ava and set up Colin as the killer, clearing the way for Reid to inherit the family fortune. Taya’s part in this operation is to take over the body of Colin, have him kill John and Ava and then kill himself—right after she has signaled headquarters to bring her back to safety. “A clean tragedy,” says Girder. “No unanswered questions.”

The bending of gender and identity in this movie is incessant (and sometimes confusing), and it enables little jokes—like the scene in which Taya, newly installed in Colin’s body, peaks down into his/her pants to assess the unfamiliar appendage she’s just acquired. Generally, though, laughs are scarce here. As Taya’s own mind starts breaking down, she finds herself involved in a shell game of slippery personalities, some of whom prove surprisingly difficult to defeat.

With its gouged-out eyeballs, fiercely pulped faces and whatnot (the fingers of a severed hand go on wriggling as if in farewell to its departing owner), Possessor could pass for a straight gore movie. The grisly stuff isn’t entirely new, maybe, but the director holds on it at unnerving length. (One scene, in which a character gets his face beaten in with a poker, might leave you feeling as if you’d been worked over with a fireplace implement yourself.)

What lifts the picture above its unstinting mayhem are the actors: Riseborough creates a harrowing portrait of a woman crumbling into existential confusion, and Leigh’s character is amusingly blasé about the gruesome particulars of her job. Also key are the intoxicating cinematography (by Karim Hussein) and production design (by Rupert Lazarus). Director Cronenberg has dispensed with digital effects and creates much of the film’s alarming magic by old-school means—with gels and other lighting strategies. Some of the most hallucinatory scenes are bathed in an arterial haze, while others play out in moody shadow.

You might not expect a movie that begins with a shot of a woman driving a needle into her head to find many directions for development. But Possessor‘s horrific conclusion sets a new standard for both cinematic savagery and slick sci-fi screenwriting. As Taya’s brain-jarring implants start to affect her marriage, she has to wonder: “Are you really married to the man, or are you married to the worm?”

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In Russia’s Chechen Republic, gay people face violence not just from strangers on the street but from their own family members, encouraged by a culture that scapegoats and victimizes them. Welcome to Chechnya documents the sometimes harrowing efforts of activists running essentially a modern underground railroad to help at-risk gay citizens flee the predominantly Muslim country.

Chechnian leader Ramzan Kadyrov famously said in a 2017 interview that there were no gay men in his country. Welcome to Chechnya reveals the purges that seek to make this absurd claim true. Dozens have been imprisoned and reportedly tortured. Some, like singer Zelim Bakaev, disappear and are simply never seen again.

A young woman is blackmailed by her uncle in an effort to make her have sex with him. One man’s entire family has to go into hiding and flee with him, because they’ve all been threatened with harm. The man tries to get the Russian government to intervene, but given Kadyrov’s cozy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his appeals fall on apathetic ears.

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In its first year on Broadway, the smash musical Hamilton raked in 11 Tony awards and a Pulitzer Prize. When a filmed version of the stage show debuted on Disney+ just in time for Independence Day 2020, it quickly became the most-streamed program not just of July but of any month this year. But perhaps the strongest evidence of Hamilton‘s overwhelming popularity is that it was enough to stave off a progressive mob at a moment when little else has survived being scrutinized through contemporary moral lenses.

Amid demonstrations against police killings of black Americans this summer, some protesters turned their ire to the Founding Fathers, many of whom owned slaves. When a crowd in Portland, Oregon, tore down and set aflame a statue of George Washington in June, it was hard not to wonder whether public opinion might be coming for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop story next. Sure enough, the hashtag #CancelHamilton began trending on Twitter shortly after the musical’s streaming release.

Alexander Hamilton was indeed an elitist with authoritarian tendencies and supposed ties to the slave trade. But in the end, the small number of would-be cancelers were no match for the musical’s devoted fans, many of whom are delighted to see America’s founding stories presented in a way that captures the ethnic and cultural diversity of the country that founding begat.

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“Ending mass incarceration is only the beginning,” write journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law in Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms. The book delves into the many ways Americans are surveilled, separated from their communities, punished, and controlled by “prison alternatives” like probation, house arrest with electronic monitoring, mandatory drug treatment, and prostitution “diversion” programs. It also covers supposedly preventive measures (such as involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations and the sex offender registry) and state “care” systems such as child protective services.

As a primer on the deep reach of our prison industrial complex and a roadmap for how to reform the reforms, the book works well. It’s less persuasive in its hostility toward incremental reformers; the authors seem to believe that abolishing prisons and all of the rest of it is feasible.

Most jarringly, the book suggests that America must not just abolish bad laws but tackle the very roots of poverty, racism, drug addiction, depression, lack of social cohesion, health care issues, etc.—often with heavy involvement from government.

But state involvement in people’s lives—even “for their own good”—ends up becoming a backdoor way of policing and control, as the book itself nicely illustrates. If we can imagine a world in which prisons are being abolished in favor of nonstate justice, can’t we also imagine one in which we tackled even bigger problems without government meddling?

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Argentine lawmaker Juan Emilio Ameri has resigned after he was seen uncovering and kissing the breast of his girlfriend during a legislative meeting conducted by Zoom. Video shows the woman sitting on Ameri’s lap. As another lawmaker speaks, Ameri pulls down the woman’s top and kisses her breast. Ameri said he did not realize he could be seen, claiming he thought the internet connection was down.

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