This is one of those movies that isn’t really about what it’s about.  By which I mean: one reasonable way to explain the pre­mise is that it’s about a shadowy organization that has figured out a way to take over people’s bodies.  Step one: kidnap the per­son who will serve as the vessel.  Step two: spend a few hours doing some quickie brain surgery on the vessel, inserting a neur­al implant.  Step three: back at HQ, hook an operative into a big machine and beam her consciousness into the vessel.  Ta‑da!  Now the operative has control over the vessel.  The shadowy or­ganization selects vessels who have the opportunity to get close to people that the organization’s clients want to assassinate.  The operative can use the vessel to kill the target and then turn the gun around and eat a bullet, making the assassination look like a murder-suicide by a deranged associate of the target and not a professional hit.  However, Possessor is less about how these black ops will shake out than it is about the cinematic pyrotech­nics of showing the operative’s mind disintegrating due to the rigors of the possession process.  We see that operatives have to undergo cognitive testing after extraction, and the head of the organization says that she doesn’t go into the field anymore because of accumulated brain damage, but we also see that the main operative is already having problems right from the get-go.  For instance, even though she is equipped with a firearm, she instead carries out her murders by hacking at her victims with sharp implements several hundred times, blood spattering hither and yon as the minutes tick by.  We also see that she repeatedly and invariably fails to carry out the suicide part of her missions, with this scene repeated ad nauseam:

So the bulk of the movie is given over to a mission in which the chief operative, her mind already somewhat degraded, estab­lishes only incomplete control over the chosen vessel, leading to a war between their overlapping psyches⁠—even as the clock is ticking on the assassination plot.  Trippy horror and ego erosion ensue.  Not for me, though I guess I can see how it might be for some.

The most recent installment of Radio K: Ask/Tell, my interactive fiction audio show, featured a game called Nightfall in which a character signed her work “Mastema”, which is apparently the name of a demon in Hebraic myth.  This is an anagram of her real name, Emma Tas, which my guest Phoenixy said “sort of sounds like a plausible person’s name”.  Yeah, sort of!  I’d never heard of anyone with the surname “Tas” before, but apparently there’s an Adam Tas in South Africa who sings folk songs in Afrikaans.  Anyway, the operative in Possessor is named Tasya Vos.  Her son is named Ira.  And so, having recently played Nightfall, when I got to the scene in which we see a bunch of certificates on the wall saying IRA VOS in big letters, my brain automatically ana­grammed that to “SAVIOR” and I thought, oh, no, movie, what’re you doing.  Come on now.

The title character here is a Muslim middle school boy in Liège; his mother and older sister are fully assimilated to Belgian cul­ture, but Ahmed has fallen under the sway of a local jihadist imam.  A kindly teacher who runs an afterschool program cater­ing to the local Muslim community is launching conversational Arabic classes, using pop songs to teach the language; while some locals are delighted, as a working knowledge of modern Arabic will allow their kids to travel to or even work in places like Cairo and Dubai, others insist that young minds should im­print only on the classical Arabic of the Quran.  Ahmed’s imam fumes that the teacher is an apostate, and instructs Ahmed to disrupt a community meeting about the class by declaring that the teacher’s new boyfriend is a Jew.  Ahmed decides to take things a step further by murdering the teacher.

Though I’m a fully assimilated “2.5 generation” type (i.e., one foreign-born parent), this movie was familiar to me in a way that a story of a child becoming a fundamentalist Christian would not have been.  I had a brother whose first name was Ahmed, though he never went by that⁠—my father said that “Ahmed” was a tra­ditional, almost mandatory name for a second son, but his mid­dle name was what we’d call him.  In the movie, we see Ahmed and other young acolytes of the jihadist imam doing the wudu ablutions before entering the mosque; I remember having to do that on the small handful of occasions that my father attempted to send me and my brothers to the Muslim equivalent of Sunday school.  But because this is a movie, it reminded me not only of real life but of other movies, specifically cinematic depictions of obsessive-compulsive disorder and autism.  We see Ahmed doing the wudu so many times that it starts to look like the ritualistic hand-washing and stair-hopping from Phoebe in Wonderland; when he has freakouts that he can’t be detained because he has to pray in exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds, it’s remini­scent of “Eight minutes to Wapner, we got eight minutes to Wapner” in Rain Man. 

The reason Ahmed is detained is that his attempt to murder his teacher is unsuccessful, and he is sent off to the Belgian equiv­alent of juvie.  The goal is rehabilitation rather than punishment, and one of the optional programs that allows offenders to leave the facility sends Ahmed out to work on a farm.  And here Young Ahmed leverages our immersion in genre conventions, because it looks like we’re headed down a fairly conventional path.  It turns out that the farmer has a pretty daughter around Ahmed’s age, named Louise, and she’s into him.  Many reviewers found this unlikely, but “why on earth does this girl like this boy” is often mysterious to me, and yet she does, so let’s stipulate an attrac­tion here.  Louise is wonderfully forward: when her signals aren’t working⁠—complimenting his glasses, complimenting the way he looks without his glasses, asking to try his glasses on, etc.⁠—she finally just says flat out, “Ahmed, I want to kiss you.”  And when he goes along with the kiss, it looks like we’re in for a story of a boy who learns that smiting the infidels takes on less urgency as a life goal when a girl likes you.  Except that instead he flips out and insists that she immediately convert to Islam to make his sin less grievous.  Now, I’ve heard many arguments over the years that to change people’s minds, you have to engage them in the sorts of terms they can relate to.  E.g., perhaps you’ve seen the screencaps floating around of evangelicals raging against stu­dent loan relief and having Deuteronomy 15 (periodic forgiveness of debts) quoted at them.  And certainly the rehab center bends over backwards to accommodate Ahmed’s fundamentalist inter­pretation of his religion.  But when Louise declines to convert, and Ahmed asks her whether she’s trying to keep him out of heaven, I was delighted to hear her reply that she’s doing no such thing, because “Heaven doesn’t exist.” It isn’t Louise’s job to deprogram this dweeb, and it was great to see a character refuse to play along and finally hit him with a dose of reality.  Maybe “Strong girl! Farm?” is more than just a matter of lifting suitcases.

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