Movie review: “Possessor” (2020)

“I want to show you some photographs we retained from your work on the Holly Bergman job. (slide changes, filling the projection screen with indistinct red) Why stab Elio Mazza? You were provided with a pistol.”

“Well, maybe it just seemed more in character.”

“Whose character?”

The young woman regards herself in the hotel room mirror dispassionately, as if she and her reflection have only ever met in passing. Her movements are halting and deliberate, almost timid, as she touches her head, hair vacuum-sealed into tight cornrows. She seems to await an outside signal imperceptible to all but her. Some indeterminate time and drastic self-care later, she now looks markedly different – hair straightened to shoulder length, wardrobe smart but not attention-seeking – though no differently. Finally, she stirs, and leaves, businesslike if still somewhat detached, and descends a staircase before merging into the flow of humanity that is metriculating towards a conference room. She picks a large man engaged in jovial conversation out of the anonymous throng and moves with purpose through the crowd, snatching a kitchen knife off a catering table in passing. Continue reading “Movie review: “Possessor” (2020)”

The Limits of Reduced Capacity

In the fall of 1999, I traveled from my East Tennessee home base to visit friends and see a concert in Columbus, Ohio, the third and final such journey I would make before moving in earnest in the handful of days between Christmas and Y2K. Nothing I encountered during any of those various excursions to the biggest city I’d yet visited gave me trepidation about making the arrangement permanent. Indeed, my first memory of Columbus was proclaiming,  “welcome home” under my breath as I gazed out at the runway from a taxiing plane’s porthole window that July. I was sheltered, but I was growing. My good friend and former singer had moved with his fiance back to her ancestral home roughly a year earlier and was now excited to welcome a potential new roommate, partner in crime, and adjunct financial investor for their forthcoming wedding. I was near breathless in anticipation, now thiiiiiiiis close to definitive escape from the South’s gravitational pull and a new lease on life. Continue reading “The Limits of Reduced Capacity”