Possessor: Uncut hooked me from its opening sequence. A woman, Holly (Gabrielle Graham), sticks a mysterious needle into her head and, staring into a mirror, turns the dial of a wooden device, which gradually twists her face from a look of pain, to sadness, then finally solemn stillness. It’s a haunting image, made only more disturbing when Holly, a hostess, later enters a club and repeatedly stabs a man to death with a knife. The event is full-blown “bring out the blood squibs” gore, and we immediately infer it has something to do with the device. You want to learn more, even if the answers are guaranteed to be quite unsettling.

As it turns out, this incident was merely a view into the business of Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), who works as an assassin for an unnamed corporation that uses brainwave technology to possess individuals and turn them into unwitting assassins, ensuring the firm’s plausible deniability. Each post-interface session is psychologically evaluated by Tasya’s handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to make sure she is still mentally capable, an understandable concern seeing how in her last job she had a gun to eliminate the target yet opted for a more brutal killing method. The profession also leaves her little time with husband, Michael (Rossif Sutherland), who worries that she’s become too overwhelmed by work. He has no idea that Tasya is a killer, and a predator at that.

The main plot centers around her next mission: inhabiting the body of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), a former drug dealer turned fiancé to socialite Ava Parse (Tuppence Middleton). Tasya’s job is to kill Ava and her father, John (Sean Bean), to ensure ownership of John’s massive data mining company goes to a family member whom the company can control from the shadows. Despite his wealthy connections, Colin works a lackluster company job watching households through cameras—what he sees ranges from the innocuous to the pornographic. Putting the plan into motion is easy, but it’s not long before Tasya’s growing emotional stability begins to threaten her exit plan from Colin’s body.

The mayhem is directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of famed director David Cronenberg, and he certainly shares his dad’s affinity for body horror. There’s no Scanner–style exploding heads or transformative makeup à la The Fly. Instead, he creates a more artificial terror whose grotesqueness lies in the art of turning human bodies into unwitting murder puppets. A surreal sequence details the brainwave transfer sequence, in which Colin’s body is dissolved in a neon sea of liquid against a dark void and then reformed to imply Tasya’s takeover. Later on, Cronenberg generates a similar disturbing image of someone in a Leatherface–style mask, whose movements give the impression of a body not worn correctly. It’s a horrifying premise matched by the gruesome actions this character commits.

Though Tasya is technically the protagonist, it’s Colin who takes center stage for the most part. There’s a Body Snatcher vibe to Abbott’s performance when he’s not so much playing a character as he is imitating one based on instructions, and his brief moments of rage make it unclear whether this implies some secret malevolence buried within Colin or the possessor, Tasya. Both of their worlds involve perverse voyeurism, whether it involves taking over a body without consent or invading one’s privacy through a computer screen, but only one of them is true science fiction in the year 2020.

Alongside the brainwave horror, there are also a couple of old-school art house gore moments that I would not recommend to anyone with a queasy stomach. Blood stains contaminate clothes, murder objects twist through flesh, and at one point fingers literally go flying. By the time the lives of the two individuals occupying Colin’s body intersect, the horrific nature of Tasya’s shadowy business model will almost certainly leave you traumatized.

Possessor plays like a Black Mirror episode if the “technology gone wrong” motif shifted into something far more existential and Lovecraftian. It’s certainly an original horror premise that, while not as character driven as Relic, still delivers on the gruesome chills.

It definitely takes a lot to horrify audiences in a year where every day feels like a horror show and more than 200,000 people have died at the hands of an untamed virus. Not even a Cronenberg could have envisioned that type of obscene story, but the one Brandon delivers here would certainly make his old man proud.