Let me just say that I highly recommend you go into Possession blind. Don’t watch a trailer. Don’t even finish reading this. Go watch it now over on Shudder, Criterion, or Metrograph. It’s also available through Kanopy or Hoopla if your library provides access. Then come back so we can talk about it in the comments. Though this probably isn’t one for the squeamish.
Possession is the sort of film that, even if you’ve had the whole plot spoiled for you, can be difficult to follow. After watching it twice, listening to three different podcasts, and reading multiple articles about it, I’m still not 100 percent sure what happened at various points in the movie. I just know I loved it.
You’re dropped immediately into a story about a crumbling marriage set against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall. It’s a formidable metaphor for the division between the stars — a very young and disarmingly handsome Sam Neill (Mark), and Isabelle Adjani (Anna), who turns in one of the most singular and unnerving performances in the history of cinema. Watching Adjani on screen is exhausting — She ricochets between unsettling detachment and high-octane delirium with alarming ease and speed. It’s the sort of performance that, when you hear it basically gave Adjani PTSD, you’re not surprised.
The third standout performance comes from Heinz Bennent, who plays Heinrich, the man Mark believes Anna is leaving him for. He moves through every scene like a drunk ballet dancer, and there’s something almost Wiseau-ian about his delivery. (It certainly doesn’t help that he keeps repeating Mark’s name.) In a more grounded film, the way he careens through the frame would seem absurd. But in the abstract nightmare of Possession, Bennent fits perfectly, rolling around, alternately assaulting Mark and coming on to him.
This frame is a work of art. Image: Metrograph Pictures
Director Andrzej Żuławski not only coaxes gorgeously unhinged performances from his stars, he builds live-action paintings. Mark and Ana sit in a cafe at the corner of a bench facing away from each other as they discuss the terms of their separation. (Before Mark tears through the cafe, hurling chairs and tables in a freakout for the ages.) Sam Neill violently pitches a rocking chair back and forth as the focus expertly tracks him. The film is simply gorgeous.
That is, until it isn’t.
What begins as a bad acid trip about a failing marriage turns into a nausea-inducing body horror in its back half. It’s revealed that Anna isn’t leaving Mark for Heinrich. In fact, Heinrich is just as desperate to get Anna back, to find her and make her his. Instead, she is shacked up with what Anna Bogutskaya (host of The Final Girls podcast and author of Feeding the Monster) calls a “Lovecraftian fuck monster.”
It’s a grotesquerie of tentacles, oozing orifices, and uncanny humanoid features, created by Carlo Rambaldi, who won Academy Awards for special effects on Alien and ET. It feeds on people. Their bodies, but also their souls. Anna seems to think it’s some sort of deity, something holy. She uses it to explore parts of herself she has repressed or lost in her relationship with Mark.
The other men in her life can’t satisfy her, so she creates an ideal lover. What starts as a slimy creature, not unlike the baby from Eraserhead, eventually becomes a doppleganger of Mark.
And then there’s the subway scene. If you’ve ever heard of Possession before, it’s probably because of this scene. Adjani hurls herself around a deserted tunnel, grunting, screaming, convulsing, before oozing blood and god knows all over the wet concrete floor. As a viewer, I feel drained after watching it. It’s three of the most intense minutes ever committed to celluloid, and even if the rest of the film was terrible, Possession would be worth watching just for this scene.
There are so many different readings of this film. I’m still not entirely sure what happens at the end. Did their son Bob drown himself? Is Mark’s doppleganger the antichrist? Is Helen also a doppleganger? (I think so.) What is the deal with Heinrich’s mother? Is Anna possessed? Or is the titular possession about the men in her life trying to exert ownership of her?
In the month since I first watched this movie, I’ve told everyone I know about it. I can’t stop thinking about it or talking about it.
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