Possession review – a nightmarish plantation drama with a divisive paranormal twist
Possession: A Haunting Exploration of Colonial Legacy and Supernatural Justice
Wanderstayfinder.com – Karla Crome's directorial debut arrives at a moment when audiences are increasingly drawn to stories that examine the enduring shadows of empire. Possession, a Sky Atlantic and Now production, weaves together historical trauma and contemporary corporate intrigue through a narrative that refuses to settle comfortably into either pure horror or straightforward drama. The result is a film that challenges viewers to confront uncomfortable questions about inheritance—both material and spiritual.
The story begins with a seemingly straightforward legal crisis. Claudia, portrayed with quiet intensity by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is a biracial lawyer at a London firm when she receives an urgent call. A client worth fifty million pounds—his fortune built on a Jamaican sugar plantation owned by his family—has died. In a twist that sends shockwaves through the family, he has excluded his only child from his will, instead bequeathing everything to an unknown "African national" named Cudjoe East.
"Sounds like a job for a partner, really," Claudia replies when presented with the assignment. This moment of professional ambition propels her to Kingston, to her mother's homeland, where she will discover that the past is far from dead.
A House That Remembers
The planter's house in Jamaica has been appearing in Claudia's nightmares for months—dreams filled with fire, terrified figures, and cryptic symbols. Yet Claudia approaches the situation as a woman of the law rather than superstition. She dismisses the "screaming Afro-gothic warnings" that seem to emanate from the property and begins her investigation with methodical precision.
Her first stop is Angelo, played by Jeff Crossley, the late client's driver. He explains that he introduced Claudia to Cudjoe approximately six months earlier, when his employer wanted to understand local history more deeply. Angelo offers a crucial piece of information: Cudjoe will not surrender his inheritance easily. This assurance proves prophetic as Claudia's search for evidence that might invalidate the will becomes increasingly complicated by forces beyond legal reasoning.
Oliver, the disinherited son, soon arrives in Jamaica. Played by Jonny Lee Miller in characteristically refined yet anxious mode, Oliver brings his own baggage to the investigation. Divorced and disinherited, he and Claudia develop a palpable sexual tension as they navigate the estate together. Their partnership becomes the lens through which the audience experiences both the modern and historical dimensions of the story.
Two Timelines, One Truth
Possession operates across two temporal planes. The present-day narrative follows Claudia and Oliver's investigation, while a parallel story unfolds three centuries ago during the period of slavery. The estate was then staffed by enslaved people and overseen by increasingly brutal members of Oliver's ancestral line. This historical thread intersects with the real Tacky's War—a series of rebellions that shook Jamaica in the eighteenth century.
What distinguishes Crome's approach is how seamlessly the supernatural elements bridge these timelines. Claudia's nightmares intensify, populated by spectral figures from other ancestral lines. Objects and images from her dream world begin appearing in the physical house, alongside documents that transform abstract colonial horrors into tangible evidence. The spirits that local people believe inhabit the house, the land, and their culture grow increasingly agitated.
Whether one accepts the supernatural or not becomes almost secondary to the film's central argument. The evidence becomes difficult to dismiss once Oliver is levitated and thrown against the ceiling by an invisible force. The past, it seems, has not finished making its claims on the present.
The Weight of History
When Claudia finally meets Cudjoe, portrayed by Sheldon Shepherd, she encounters a man who is as immovable as Angelo predicted. But Cudjoe reveals something extraordinary: he is nearly three hundred years old. He is either the surviving Matthew or his reincarnation—the illegitimate son of the original landowner, conceived through the rape of an enslaved woman. His father had promised him freedom and the estate, but this promise was broken by Charlotte, played by Bel Powley, the legitimate daughter.
Charlotte's role in the family's history is complicated. She may have hastened her father's death from tongue cancer—a disease that developed strangely after he cut out Matthew's grandmother's tongue as punishment for alleged involvement in a failed uprising. These interconnected injustices, sufferings, and legacies pulse through both timelines, demonstrating how colonial violence continues to reverberate across generations.
A Director's Vision
Karla Crome, previously known for her acting work in Misfits, You, Me and the Apocalypse, and most recently Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, brings a distinctive sensibility to this material. Her first full-length directorial effort functions as a potent conjuring of colonialism's pervasive and enduring toxicities.
The film asks fundamental questions about justice and responsibility. Are reparations possible? Where does accountability begin and end? Is it better to have ancestral spirits exact vengeance upon the guilty descendants, or to leverage modern exploitation of one's heritage for "optics" into financial gain and professional advancement?
For some viewers, the accumulating paranormal elements will deepen the sense of dread and horror. For others, there is a risk that supernatural intervention obscures the human truth of the story and the suffering it depicts. Where one lands on this question may depend on whether one believes ghosts and spirits can devise experiences more terrible than those humans create for one another.
Part of the audience may always feel that recourse to the diabolic or ineffable represents a certain kind of narrative escape—but Possession suggests that sometimes the supernatural is simply another way of naming what has always been real.
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