I still haven’t got my head around the new Sky TV thriller Possession, with all five episodes now available to stream.
We follow Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an ambitious biracial lawyer who travels to Jamaica to challenge an inheritance claim made by a local man against a wealthy white aristocrat.
However, she arrives to find the disputed estate is a former plantation that has long haunted her dreams. Cue a terrifying slew of 1800s flashbacks, curses, and misunderstood spiritual connection.
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It’s colonial horror with a fresh 2020s take, and the supernatural tone might remind you of one of the biggest box office hits of the last five years.
In fact, it’s the cast’s immediate answer when I ask for their opinion on what would be best to double bill with Possession, but there’s one connection that I didn’t see coming.
Stream Sinners on HBO Max after binging Possession on Sky TV
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“It was being made at the same time we were making this show, so we didn’t realise that there was a connection, but Sinners keeps getting brought up,” director Storm Saulter tells me when I put the double bill question to him and Mbatha-Raw.
“It’s different, but it’s also speaking about certain histories: about Afro-spiritualists, voodoo, magic, connection to Obeah (a monster from West African folklore).
“So I think those are two pieces in two different worlds, but they speak to the history, tradition, forward-thinking, and that the past is present.”
Once Saulter says this, I don’t know why I didn’t make the same connection sooner. Though Sinners is more concerned with vampires in a more traditional sense, director Ryan Coogler’s vision was so uniquely steeped in cultural history that’s usually not done justice in mainstream media — and Possession fits that same criteria.
In fact, I think that Sinners is a much better fit than Belle, Mbatha-Raw’s 2013 film critics have already compared to Possession.
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She plays the titular character Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was a mixed-race illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral raised in 18th Century England.
But does Mbatha-Raw see the connection that everybody else has?
“Obviously, to me, they’re very separate projects, but I can see that there’s some common themes,” she responds. “Belle was a period drama that, was about one of the fewer known biracial aristocrats in England whose uncle was the Lord Chief Justice of England. In Possession, I’m playing the lawyer, so I definitely see, some of the comparisons there.
“It’s a privilege to have a canon of work behind me where occasionally you have the privilege to really confront some of these issues in your work. It’s not lost on me.”
And if watching Possession, Sinners and potentially Belle is too much for some? “Get outside… go for a walk,” Mbatha-Raw jokes.
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