"Possession" Review: A Nightmarish Plantation Drama with a Divisive Paranormal Twist

What would you do if your client, owner of a £50 million fortune built on a Jamaican sugar plantation, died and his will disinherited his only child in favor of someone nobody had ever heard of, named Cudjoe East? You'd send your firm's likely only mixed-race lawyer, Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), to Kingston to track this man down and discredit him as quickly as possible. "Sounds more like a job for a partner," Claudia says — and heads off to her mother's homeland, securing her own promotion in the process.

The plantation house turns out to be the very same one that's been appearing in her recent nightmares: fires, terrified figures, strange symbols. But she's a woman of the law, not of superstition; she sets aside the Afro-Gothic warnings and gets to work looking for anything that might invalidate the will. Before long, the disinherited son, Oliver (Jonny Lee Miller, in polite-and-uneasy mode), joins her — both to investigate and to build some sexual tension.

Then comes a dual-timeline mystery: one set in the present, the other 300 years earlier, when the estate was worked by enslaved people, Oliver's ancestors grew increasingly cruel, and the chain of uprisings known as Tacky's War took place. A supernatural tone increasingly entangles the two timelines: images and objects appearing in the dream world materialize in the house, accompanied by documents that give concrete form to the abstract horrors of colonialism.

The show's greatest strength is its atmosphere and Mbatha-Raw's measured, tension-carrying performance. Its most contentious element is the paranormal aspect: for some, a powerful metaphor giving voice to suppressed memories of the past; for others, a dilution of real historical horror into genre thrills. The result is a series that, while imperfect, is hard to forget.