by Mark Murton

Directed by: Brandon Cronenberg

Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains slight spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is a corporate assassin who uses brain-implant technology to inhabit other people’s bodies and use them to commit assassinations for the benefit of the company. Increasingly, she is unable to separate her work from her domestic life which is haunted by violent images as she starts to lose her identity.

Kitty Cameo: After another successful mission, Vos returns to her home and her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and son Ira. As they sit eating a meal the family cat jumps up onto the table and is quickly gathered up by Michael and placed on he floor.

The cat doesn’t feature again other than in a four-frame flashback to this moment when Vos is again inhabiting another victim (although the footage differs slightly from the first time and so must be from a different take).

The reason there’s a cat in the film at all is perhaps explained in a climactic confrontation at the Vos home when another character demands of Michael: “Just think, one day your wife is cleaning the cat litter and she gets a worm in her, and that worm ends up in her brain. The next thing that happens is she gets an idea in there, too. And it’s hard to say whether that idea is really hers or it’s just the worm. And it makes her do certain things. Predator things. Eventually, you realize that she isn’t the same person any more. She’s not the person that she used to be. It’s gotta make you wonder, whether you’re really married to her… or married to the worm.”

The cat actor was provided by Mad Cat Wrangling.

Final Mewsings: If you are getting weird thoughts from a worm, don’t blame your cat!

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