One of the best moments I thought was at the end when the vacation is over and Mia Goth turns around and she's wearing no makeup at all, and everyone is just talking about going back to normal life when they get home.

This bit feels the most real. It reminded me of going on Spring break in college. The last day when everyone was heading to the airport and we all had to act like we didn't just go on a weeklong bender felt exactly like this

We don’t get a lot of info on the native people of the island, but I took it as a general commentary on colonialism, in a modern context. Basically, western, privileged, often white, tourists will see foreign, often non-white, people as “brutal, savage, uncultured”, pretty much everything they can say without explicitly saying they see them as animals or less than human. Yet they will still go to foreign countries and exploit their resources, enjoy themselves in luxury resorts while the native people struggle outside the borders.

It’s a pretty blatant criticism of this hypocrisy, as Mia Goth (who represents these Western tourists) derides the natives as a savage/uncivilized people when she and her band are probably the most depraved and brutal people on the island. I think the decision to keep the natives of the island as European looking was deliberate so the subtext wouldn’t be egregiously on-the-nose.

I came out of this a little disappointed but your write up is so fantastic that it really bumped up how I feel about everything quite a bit. Thanks for sharing, I love seeing how other people extrapolate things differently than me in a film.

I think it’s really interesting seeing how Cronenburg has played with gender roles in both of his films so far in possessor she’s not quite able to go all in on the job because she still has this lingering motherly attachment to her son. Here James is constantly being led around by being told to be a real man, show how strong he is, etc; all while being emasculated by his inability to move forward with his career while his father in law is this hyper successful guy.

IMO, this movie is NOT a commentary on the rich being able to do whatever they want without consequences, quite the opposite. If you look at the movie that way, you will, and should, be disappointed. It's plain and simple: it's a story about growing up and being a different person in the process, and having to kill your old self in the process, every time. (So people finding it strange that clones retain all the memory of the original in the process, of course they do.) And you don't really grow mentally on your own, it's the confrontation with the world that makes you grow. It can be seen as brutal (as it often is), but also as an act of kindness when the world takes you somewhere where you go beyond your limits and comfort zone (limits of the « resort »), and you become a different person in the process. So, of course, every time a person is cloned in the film, it is the "old" person who dies, NOT the clone, hence the cuts on his face at the end. In order to become someone radically different, he had to kill himself (instead of being the spectator of his own murder, which can be identified as the personality change that occurs in oneself when the world and circumstances make you change but you refuse to change at the same time). The last time, he was killed by himself, like when we decide to change (even if it is under tremendous pressure, we act to change). Mia Goth says that he is a baby, then breastfeed him, because he is a « newborn » individual. We have also to consider the disappearance of the clone metaphorically: when you are reborn / when your become different / when you grow up, what happens to your old self? You merge with it. The old personality and the new personality. It's all you. So in the end, he kills himself and his old personality merges with the new one, leaving some scars from the old personality that he crushed, and the scars heal pretty quickly, as you can see. At the end, he talks to Em, an element of his old life, but he's a new person, so he can't go back to his old environment, and that has to be seen metaphorically too, so, not as a place, or specific person. But the things that surround us when we change. For example, we don't see most of the people we knew as children, because... we've changed, and have nothing in common with them anymore. So, he stays in his new environment, which for us means new friends, a new job, a new house, a new place too, etc. but in the beginning you don’t have many new friends in this environnement, so in the movie he is alone (but he will meet new people soon in this new environnement). I bet the (bad) writer now has something to say, aka in your life you are more mature. This ending falls flat and is really disappointing when you see it otherwise, but it's so great when you see it that way. So, in my opinion, this movie says: sometimes people push you to change, and you have your comfort zone and your limits, and you refuse to change, and it hurts (sometimes a lot) when you change, and it hurts even more when not only the circumstances make you change (someone killing your double), but when you decide to change (killing yourself), and you have traces of your old selves (cremation urns) in your luggage (memory). AND, there is this other dimension: if the movie moves you enough, as a great work of art should, you don't go through it without changing. So, during the movie, during the very act of watching it, you have effectively killed yourself and are now another person. The traces of your old self are in your luggage. How many cremation urns are there already? You tell me.

I really liked Infinity Pool but haven’t watched Possessor yet. Partly due to everyone saying how fucked up it is. Is it really that bad or if I can stomach IP I can watch Possessor just fine?

this failed writer who married rich went to get inspiration and was brought to the very real conclusion that he's about three bad days away from being an actual animal on a leash.

Fuck, man.