La Possession

She feels caught up in a string of uncontrollable events. Haunted by a sense of impending doom, she fantasizes herself as a victim in serial killer movies. Imagines her cut-off head bobbing in a fish tank. She wonders if her Korean boyfriend – an outright weirdo – might have infected her with a long-incubating virus which also carried the seed of inevitable tough luck.

By imagining this tormented woman who confusingly can’t really tell reality and fiction apart, François-Xavier Rouyer takes us into a parallel world where anything is possible. A film buff with a penchant for horror films such as The Thing or the Body Snatchers movies, he also draws from classical playwrights by the likes of Plautus, Molière or Heinrich von Kleist to bring his very personal version of the Amphitryon myth.

To what extent can an individual take over the body and mind of another individual?  To this odd question, François-Xavier Rouyer proposes a number of fairly funny or disquieting answers, depending on your point of view. Through a virus gnawing away at people and things, he dramatizes a metaphor of our times where ghosts are no longer the revenants of the afterlife but instead our unfulfilled desires, our frustrations, our missed doppelgangers or our collective inadequacies.