Sundance 2020: 10 Films Everyone Is Buzzing About

5. Possessor

Possessor movie
Well Go USA

Violent horror-thrillers aren't normally the kind of thing you'll find on the Sundance docket, but director Brandon Cronenberg's (son of David Cronenberg) stylish sci-fi tale has been turning plenty of heads since its festival premiere.

The movie stars Andrea Riseborough, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sean Bean, and centres on a shady organisation that specialises in brain-implant technology. But of course, this power isn't used for good: agents who work for this organisation (like Riseborough's character, Tasya Vos) are able to control the minds of their targets to make them carry out murders.

Picture a hitman who doesn't actually need to pull the trigger: they can just hack into someone else's mind and make them do it instead. Possessor sounds like it has shades of Leigh Whannell's underrated Upgrade, and considering that many critics have pointed out how violent and bloody it is, it sounds like it has just as much of a horrific edge as that film, too - if not more so.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!