Possession

Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, and Heinz Bennent

Director: Andrzej Zulawski

123 minutes (18) 1981

Second Sight 4K UHD 

Rating: 9/10

Review by Christopher Geary

[Released 15th December] 

Andrzej Zulawski’s eerie masterpiece Possession is a searing cult-movie of artistic outrage, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. Unfaithful Anna and ex-spy Mark have a failing marriage, troubled by evasive disinterest and passionate lies. The shadowy backdrop of cold daylight, living close to the Berlin Wall, increases their anxieties, and fuels paranoiac rage. “I love seeing you miserable. It’s so reassuring,” remarks Anna’s friend Margie. Negotiations for a break-up farce, or apocalyptic split, are so profoundly difficult between them that even face-to-face conversations are conducted almost back-to-back. What might, at first, appear to be only overwrought ‘soapy’ banality is just a prelude to a grandly lurid tapestry, with episodic violence and urban horrors that are forcefully unsettling, at least, yet soon bursting from imagination on the borders of insanity. 

Possession is a melancholy feminist statement about the ‘mask of evil’ wrapped in a coolly suffocating blanket of intense emotional states, and otherworldly enigmas. After one blazing row, Anna throws a suicidal wobbly on the open streets of this curiously depopulated city, yet she walks away from the amusing symbolism of twin car-wrecks thrown from a swerving lorry. Anna’s supposed lover Heinrich is a seemingly demented New Age fan-boy who claims “through the disease we can reach God”, and the disease he’s talking about is, presumably, human life. 

Mark is, at first, baffled, but soon intrigued, to discover his young son’s school-teacher is Anna’s double. A comically inept private detective, hired by Mark, gets himself killed with a broken wine bottle in a vicious and yet decadent murder scene. Anna’s later killings are also shockingly brutal or inherently callous. In a dilapidated hideaway, where “darkness is easeful”, the nightmarish monster (with special effects created by Carlo Rambaldi) writhes pathetically on a bloodstained mattress, or slouches in undeniably creepy silence like an ‘alien’ chrysalis, in a dank corner of the bedroom in an otherwise disused flat. 

Whether she’s in flashback mode, as a sadistic ballet instructor, or playing at home with her wide-eyed innocent son, Anna is plainly losing all sense to her psychoses. The extraordinary Adjani is mesmerising, throughout this movie, giving everything for a dazzling portrayal of a tormented soul, who is the ‘maker’ of her own metaphorical evil. She laughs and screams during her demonically-possessed (and notorious), miscarriage scene. The actress goes so far OTT that she achieves escape velocity. But, instead of attaining some kind of blissful state, akin to metaphysical weightlessness in Pascal Laugier’s instant-classic Martyrs (2008), or even the ‘Star-child’, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), her morally immortal ‘orbiting’ position above this doomed world maintains a gravitational force to match the graphic lunacy of a harsh Moon-faced mistress. 

For his contribution to the steadily escalating mayhem, Mark stumbles into a shoot-out against local police. When the ‘finished’ creature shows up, as Mark’s double, for the deathly reconciliation scene (“Is there a way out?”), any final hints of renewing marital happiness evaporate as the judgement of ‘WW3’ dawns in more ways than one. It’s a perplexing end to ambiguity that’s often sinister. However, placed alongside Stanley Kubrick’s equally magnificent The Shining (1980), it becomes clear that Possession has nine tenths of the lore, and is another one of the greatest early works from this first decade of truly modern horror cinema. 

Iconoclastic director Zulawski’s brand of surrealism was bemusingly prone to grotesque visuals and violent action, so that incomplete work, such as Polish sci-fi epic On The Silver Globe (started in 1976, but not finished and released until 1988), is often guilty of inescapable theatricality. It’s written with constant speechifying, not any naturalistic dialogue, while being too wholly pretentious for conventional screen-drama, despite some mythical space-opera creativity that now looks influenced by Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels (1965 - 85), Jodorowsky’s failed adaptation in 1975, and, eventually, by David Lynch’s outstanding movie, Dune (1984). Possession has all the hallmarks of a director emerging from the personal and political turmoil of communist Poland. 

In terms of its genre content, Possession also links back to David Lynch’s bizarre fantasy Eraserhead (1977), and David Cronenberg’s remarkably icky The Brood (1979), that also showcased themes of acute breakdown, prompting divorce, and hysterical behaviours by disturbed women. Almost uniquely, though, Possession welds effective political allegory to its grimly tangled plotting of darkly composed ‘romantic triangles’ or miscegenation. This riffs upon, and mirrors, albeit melodramatically, the doppelgangers in Philip Kaufman’s fully-SF mystery-thriller, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978), a superior remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 film. 

Zulawski was influenced by Tarkovsky and Kurosawa, but his ability to mix genre frights with disturbing farce distinguished his work from typical Art-house fare. Vivid dreamscapes in Possession pre-empted director Matthew Chapman’s cult flick, Heart Of Midnight (1988), a noir-ish haunted-house mystery starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, exploring sub-Lynchian themes with some Argentoesque visuals, although both of these pictures crib from the stylised imagery and shifting tones of Roman Polanski’s classic, Repulsion (1968). Possession remains disturbing even when much later movies, like Spanish mystery-horror, The Untamed (2016), by Amat Escalante, seems vaguely inspired by Zulawski’s monster, and attempts to copycat some of Possession’s most unforgettable imagery.   

Splendidly restored in 4K, and presented with (producer-approved) Dolby Vision, Possession remains a stunningly beautiful, yet starkly grotesque, achievement for genre Art-house cinema. This is essential viewing for any keen fans of sublimely absurdist, yet timeless, nightmares about living through faulty humanity. 

Disc extras:

• Director’s commentary (moderated by Daniel Bird) 
• Commentary by co-writer Frederic Tuten (moderated by Daniel Bird)
• Commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Alison Taylor
• American re-edit (1983): newly restored from an archive print (77 minutes)
• American re-edit commentary by Daniel Bird and Manuela Lazic
• The Horror of Normality: Guillermo del Toro on Possession (26 minutes)
• The Shadow We Carry: Kat Ellinger on Possession (18 minutes)
• Andrzej Zulawski - Director: archive documentary (51 minutes)
• Repossessed: the film’s British and American reception (12 minutes)
• A Divided City: Berlin locations (7 minutes)
• The Sounds of Possession: interview with composer Andrzej Korzynski (19 minutes)
• Our Friend In The West: interview with producer Christian Ferry (6 minutes)
• Basha: featurette on poster artist Barbara ‘Basha’ Baranowska (8 minutes)
• The Other Side Of The Wall: the making of Possession (52 minutes)
• Archive interview with Andrzej Zulawski (36 minutes)
• Deleted scenes (4 minutes)
• Trailer