‘Possession’ Review: Jamaica’s Colonial Sins Come Back To Haunt Its Present In A Brutal Genre Ride

The colonial and slavery legacy of Jamaica is at the center of Possession, a British series that arrives after premiering in the UK last August. Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Surface, The Morning Show), the series starts with a present-day legal and inheritance dispute that can be traced back to a plantation several centuries ago, using a more fantastical than realistic approach to explore the connections between Jamaica’s colonial past and its present.

Mbatha-Raw plays Claudia, a British lawyer whose mother was Jamaican and died giving birth to her, while her father is white. At the law firm where she works, they learn that a wealthy client has left his fortune not to his son and natural heir, Oliver (Jonny Lee Miller), but to an enigmatic Jamaican man named Cudjoe East. Assuming there must be some kind of fraud behind the decision, the firm sends Claudia to Kingston to sort things out. The fact that she is Black, they assume, might prove useful.

Claudia arrives in Jamaica and quickly finds herself immersed in a strange, mystical world she knows nothing about. Although her mother was from there, Claudia was raised by her father after her mother’s death, and today she places far more faith in legal procedure and “reason” than in anything traditional, which to her tends to look like superstition, witchcraft or old wives’ tales. That is why she pays little attention when the driver taking her to Hope Hill, the disputed estate that was once a plantation, warns her about what she should and shouldn’t open or touch. Without realizing it, she ends up opening something resembling a portal between the past and the present.

From there, the series moves back and forth between the 18th century and the present day. In the present, Claudia tries to track down the elusive Cudjoe (Sheldon Shepherd), an intense man who claims to be 300 years old and insists that the land belongs to him. He says he is the illegitimate son of the plantation’s original owner, conceived with an enslaved woman, and has no intention of handing the property over to Oliver or anyone else. As strange events begin to unfold, making Claudia question the supposedly rational nature of what is happening, Possession travels three centuries into the past, gradually connecting the contemporary story to the history of slavery, with the family’s original heir, Charlotte (Bel Powley), as its troubled protagonist.

Possession connects these two timelines through the conventions of fantasy and horror —some of them, in fact, quite effectively— using the portals between past and present to gradually make Claudia understand that, despite the centuries that have passed, the tragedies of that era continue to reverberate in the present. In that sense, the series becomes a journey in which Claudia rediscovers her roots and, in doing so, brings the damage and horrors of the age of slavery into the present.

To develop this premise, creator and showrunner Karla Crome throws an arsenal of classic folk horror tropes into the mix, drawing on the Caribbean’s long tradition of supernatural stories (voodoo, zombies and so on) and, more specifically, Jamaica’s obeah traditions, which are associated with magic, witchcraft and possession. These spirits capable of crossing through time provide the main narrative device that allows the characters from the present and the past to collide, generally in violent ways, since the same racial tensions that existed then remain very much alive today. A character like Claudia, the daughter of a white father and a black mother, is therefore crucial to understanding this historical relationship.

Gruesome and intense, much more interested in full-blown genre thrills than in any particularly rigorous historical reflection, Possession nevertheless works as a fierce critique of colonialism and the abuses committed by white colonizers throughout the Caribbean, and in Jamaica in particular. The series never questions the supernatural nature of what is happening —by the second episode, some characters are being lifted into the air by invisible forces while others meet sudden and unexpected deaths— but it consistently makes clear where those tensions come from. The law may serve the powerful as a way of controlling the world they inhabit, but once magic and witchcraft enters the picture, legal documents are worth very little.