Possession review – a nightmarish plantation drama with a divisive paranormal twist

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What do you do when a client worth £50m – thanks to family ownership of a Jamaican sugar plantation upon which a modern fortune was built – pops his clogs and is unexpectedly revealed to have cut his only child out of his will, leaving the lot to a hitherto unknown “African national” called Cudjoe East? Why, you call in your firm’s (likely only) biracial lawyer, Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), to go over to Kingston, find him and discredit him as soon as possible. “Sounds like a job for a partner, really,” replies Claudia and, promotion thus secured, duly heads out for her mother’s homeland. She may wish, before we are very far in, that she had gone for senior partnership instead.

The planter’s house is one that has been appearing to her in recent nightmares that have been full of fires, terrified figures and strange symbols. But! She is a woman of the law, not superstition, so she sets the screaming Afro-gothic warnings aside and gets on with searching the house for anything that could suggest the pro-Cudjoe will is invalid and questioning the locals for any clue as to where Cudjoe himself might be. Her late client’s driver Angelo (Jeff Crossley) tells her that he introduced the pair about six months ago when his boss wanted to learn more about local history. Angelo assures her that she will not be able to talk Cudjoe into giving up his legacy.

Soon Oliver (Jonny Lee Miller, in posh, nervy mode), the disinherited son, has joined her so that they can investigate and – he is divorced as well as disinherited – build sexual tension together.

What follows is a dual-timeline mystery. One story unfolds in the present, another 300 years ago when the estate was staffed by enslaved people, overseen by increasingly cruel members of Oliver’s ancestral line and facing the series of rebellions known as Tacky’s War – with a supernatural inflection that allows the two increasingly to mesh. Claudia’s nightmares increase, populated perhaps by spectral members of other ancestral lines. Images and objects that appear in the dream world turn up in the house, along with documents that make the abstract horrors of colonialism concrete. The spirits with which the local people think the house, their land, their culture is infused become increasingly restless. If you believe in that kind of thing, of course – but it does become much harder to deny once Oliver has been levitated and bounced off the ceiling by an unseen force.

When Claudia meets Cudjoe (Sheldon Shepherd), he is as unmoving as Angelo promised, but also claims to be nearly 300 years old – the surviving, or surviving incarnation of, Matthew, the illegitimate son (which is to say, a child conceived by the rape of an enslaved woman) of the then landowner. Matthew was promised his freedom and the estate by his father, but was denied it by Charlotte (Bel Powley), their father’s legitimate daughter. Who may or may not have hastened her father’s death from tongue cancer – strangely contracted after he cut out Matthew’s grandmother’s tongue as a punishment for possible involvement in an abortive uprising.

So the past’s injustices, sufferings and legacies work themselves into and through the present. Possession is the first full-length work from Karla Crome, so far best known for her acting roles in Misfits, You, Me and the Apocalypse and most recently in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. It is a potent conjuring of the pervasive, enduring evils and toxicities of colonialism. It’s a powerful look at how unadmitted sins and guilt manifest themselves and whether justice for some crimes – such sprawling, normalised, heinous crimes that you begin almost to warm to those who act out of simple depravity and malevolence – can ever be done. Are reparations possible? Where does responsibility begin and end? What is better: ancestral spirit vengeance being visited upon the guilty’s descendants, or the parlaying of a boss’s modern exploitation of your skin colour for “optics” into money and promotion?

For some the accumulating paranormal-mystical element will add to the dread and horror. For others, there is a danger that it obscures the truth of the story and the suffering. Where you land, I suppose, largely depends on whether you feel that ghosts and spirits are capable of thinking up and delivering any worse experiences than man seems able to conjure and visit on his fellow man. Part of me always feels that recourse to the diabolic or ineffable is a cop-out, but that is undoubtedly a vast failure of imagination on my part.

But either way, Possession is a well-textured, evocative tale touching on many important questions, if never quite digging down far enough into any of them to be truly satisfying.