The horror director is back with a sci-fi shocker about mind-robbing assassins going on violent killing sprees. He tells our writer why digital effects just don’t cut the eyeball

Brandon Cronenberg has the sniffles. This would not be worthy of note, but for the fact that the 40-year-old Canadian film-maker, son of horror pioneer David, made his directorial debut in 2012 with Antiviral, about a clinic that harvests diseases from celebrities. For the right price, patients can be infected with Hollywood herpes, or catch the exact strain of flu that caused their favourite singer to cancel a tour. So whose cold is he wearing? “Nothing so interesting,” says Cronenberg through a bunged-up nose. “It’s just sinus trouble. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be disgusting.”

It’s a bit late for that, as anyone who has seen his films will attest. In Antiviral, restaurants serve steaks cultivated from A-list muscle tissue – while his new psychological horror, Possessor, features assassins who inhabit people’s bodies via neural implants, then use them as puppets to carry out hits. One such operative, played by Andrea Riseborough, is having difficulty negotiating the work-life balance. Although equipped with a gun, she takes it upon herself to sever her victim’s jugular instead. The stabbing felt “in character”, she says during her debriefing, to which her boss, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, asks: “Whose character?” Decanted into another patsy, Riseborough goes wild, driving a poker into her target’s mouth and breaking his teeth like biscuits, before gouging out an eyeball for good measure.