MUBI

If there is a movie deserving the tag ‘psychological horror’, it is Possession. Here the protagonist’s inner evil takes on a living form of a wiggling slimy creature. She goes on a killing spree to keep him alive. That is, when they are not having sexual intercourse. And, of course, there is the famous subway passage scene in which Isabelle Adjani’s character miscarries her own faith. She is rolling in milk, blood, piss, mucus and every other bodily liquid you can imagine. The role earned Adjani ‘The Best Actress’ award at the Cannes Film Festival, yet she claims she is never going to play a similar role again. Possession is two hours of hysterical wailing right into your face. It’s a movie of excess and about emotional excess. The watching experience can only be compared to Antichrist (2009) – except the latter doesn’t have the extraordinary performance of Isabelle Adjani.

“WHAT DID I JUST SEE?”

The sole reason why the masterpiece does not get the attention it deserves is the movie’s noteworthy talent for disguise. Frequently advertised among classic horror movies of 1970s and 1980s, such as The Exorcist (1973), The Amityville Horror (1979) and Friday the 13th (1980), it probably attracts the ‘popcorn’ audience and is spurned by more serious movie-goers. It is hardly surprising that the only FAQ for Possession on IMDb is “What did I just see?”. Well, not what you expected.

The director, Andrzej Zulawski, is Polish and was born in 1940. Not as beloved in his homeland as his teacher, both critically and commercially acknowledged Andrzej Wajda, he left Poland after his second movie, The Devil (1972), was banned. After his success in France, Zulawski was invited to come back and fulfill a project of his own choice. Ironically, the production of the ’project’, On The Silver Globe (1988), was brutally stopped by the same Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Possession (1981) was financed by a French production studio and shot in West Germany.

The movie takes place in derelict and gloomy Cold War Berlin. Mark (Sam Neill) comes back from a duty journey and finds his marriage falling apart. His wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), does not live at home anymore. She has a sexually superior boyfriend Heinrich (Michael Hogben), a kung-fu practicing psychic who sends her postcards from Taj Mahal and brings their son, Bob (Michael Hogben), expensive gifts. Mark sleeps with Anna’s best friend Marget (Margit Gluckmeister). The camera circles Mark’s and Anna’s family drama with a voyeuristic precision. Isabelle Adjani’s performance is striking and her unceasing hysteria starts making you cringe. Everything about Possession is twofold, or binary (even Berlin, which is divided by the Berlin Wall) and Ana’s raving character is countered by Mark, who remains stiff and emotionless. Sounds like a proper family drama, but soon the bodies are going to start piling up and we are going to go on a quest to find Heinrich’s missing soul, even if his body is still intact.

The shift towards surreal and macabre is sudden. It feels almost as if Possession is two in one; as is everything else in it. Either ‘two in one’, or ‘one in two’. Both Anna and Mark have doppelgängers, whose presence is never explained. Action moves from Mark’s and Anna’s claustrophobic apartment to more open spaces, giving room for all the madness to come. After Mark hires a private detective to follow Anna, we find out that she squats an abandoned apartment to hide a monster. As the movie progresses, the monster’s appearance becomes more and more human, while humans fall deeper into violence, hysteria and ramblings often hard to comprehend. We are heading towards the apocalypse.

VENUS AND MARS

Zulawski’s own messy divorce served as an inspiration for the movie. There is a lot of vomiting in Possession, as there’s a lot of excess. Excess is what the movie is really about, about being overwhelmed by emotions, about what happens when they spill over, but it also served the purpose of helping the director to exercise his own demons by giving them an on-screen form. Helen, Anna’s mysterious doppelgänger, claims she comes ”from a place where evil seems easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the flesh”, and if you can see it, you know the danger of evil.

Here I have to mention Antichrist again. Von Trier was suffering from depression and Zulawski was mentally exhausted, but there is more (perhaps the Cannes public wouldn’t have been surprised by Zulawski’s name as much as they were shocked by Tarkovskij’s; both would have been equally fitting). First, there is the figure of a male child. He is the only bridge between the male and the female. In Antichrist, the child appears only in the dreamlike opening sequence, at the end of which he dies and the relationship starts falling apart. In Possession, Bob is the only reason Anna keeps coming back to Mark. Here the child is present until the end of the movie – but he is not really present. Bob spends most of the time underwater, trying to beat the ‘world record in tub diving’. He finally drowns himself in the final apocalyptic scene.

In both movies, ‘she’ is the deranged one. The male stays rational. In Antichrist, ‘he’ is a psychiatrist trying to help ‘her’ with the loss of their son. Zulawski’s Bob is the one trying to fix the relationship. He gives up his job for ‘family reasons’ and seeks out for Heinrich in search for Anna, all in vain, until he lets himself be seduced by the Evil and joins his wife’s Danse Macabre. Both ‘she’ and Anna are driven by a primal vitality, which is repressed by the husband’s cold prudence. For Mark, even the thought of God is obtrusive. “God is evil”, he proclaims. He retreats to adultery and even abuse with frigid pragmatism. Throughout the movie, we see a repeating shot of him tightly gripping Anna’s and Bob’s torsos, which is undoubtedly a sign of (attempted) dominance. Mark’s ‘tight grip’ is a central element in the movie. It is why Anna was fascinated by Heinrich, who is full of himself – because of his unrestrained ego, imagination (and religion), narcissism, his (bi)sexual freedom. After she miscarries her “Sister Faith” in the subway passage, the last constraint is lifted and she can let go of the torturing inner evil and even embrace it. In the following disturbing scene, she scolds her ballet students for not having the “righteous anger” to say”I, I can do as well, I can be better! I’m the best!”

“There is nothing in common among women except menstruation”, says Helen, scorning Mark’s “war against women”. While van Trier lets ‘him’ escape the wife’s frenzy, Mark finally gives in. It’s time to let go, and all hell breaks loose.

some spoilers ahead

Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is both the most perfectly realized example of a horror film that I’ve ever seen (i.e. = most literally horrifying) AND one of the most startling, revelatory, resistant versions of the art house film.

What starts out as the story of a dysfunctional marriage between Mark (Neill) and Anna (Adjani) becomes, by about 10 or 12 minutes in, a relentlessly unfolding apocalypse.

Adjani’s oft-discussed performance exudes, advances on the screen, in orders of magnitude. Her 4-minute single-take transformation in the infamous subway scene is nearly indescribable, both in terms of her performance and in its significance to the plot. (On subsequent viewings it is tempting to say the scene is about a miscarriage, or [and? also?] about another character’s birth, indeed the film’s titular MONSTER.)

Zulawski has commented that the reason so many of his films contain an apocalypse is because of his own biography, being born under Soviet control. His debut feature, The Third Part of the Night, takes up this theme most explicitly, not only adapting its title from the end of days described in the Book of Revelation, but even going so far as to use Revelation’s passages to frame (if not adequately unpack) the film’s beginning and end.

In Possession, the apocalypse unfolding inside the film’s structure is twofold:

One, it is the moment-by-moment, off-the-charts, always-exploding (or about to) absolute MANIA of the film—its mounting action, piled-on acting, a phantasmagoria layered frame by frame. I.e., this:

Or this:

Or this:

This first apocalypse is typified by the startlingly reckless, insistently depraved acts carried out by the characters as they move through the plot. See Mark’s coercion of a taxi driver into an almost certain death, a kamikaze attack on police in the hopes of distracting them long enough for Anna—by this point in the film unapologetically, fundamentally deranged—to escape their net.

Or, even better, one of Mark and Anna’s many domestic disturbances, this one in a cafe early in the film, during which they discuss what to do about their son Bob when they split. In short order this tense, unpleasant conversation turns nuclear, on public display much screaming, flailing, flinging of cups and chairs and plates—Mark barreling into one piece of furniture after another in an unchecked fit, stopped only by the entire kitchen staff pouring into the room to dog-pile on him.

Anna’s speech just before this full-on freak out—as well as the many, concentric conversations the two engage in—serves not as ironic comment on traditional morality, but instead as a naming of their apocalypse, a putting into words of how barren, fallow, hollow their moral-ethical universe has become. (It is distressing at times, especially in relation to their son, to try and imagine Mark and Anna before this—as wife and husband, as lovers, as one-time intimate friends.)

Or, another example: When Mark’s double—the use of dark twins and doubles being one of the film’s amorphous, unresolved mysteries—employs his palpable ability to corrupt. He encourages a bystander—wide-eyed, stereotypically “innocent” and plain—to fire indiscriminately at a gang of approaching men. (The fact that she is blond and has one leg in a cast makes her an unacknowledged double of another character in the film, Anna’s best friend Margie [those familiar with Fassbinder will recognize Margrit Carstensen here]. This unnamed woman’s role was originally much more present in the script—she was to be the new wife of Anna’s ex-husband—and this further situates her in a narrative limbo. She is a leftover from a previous draft, an excised, deleted character somehow appearing here nonetheless.) Mark’s double presses the pistol into her hand, guides her aim with his own, reacts to the startled but darkly thrilled look on her face with a knowing nod, a look of his own like: “Eh? Wasn’t pulling the trigger just the best? Wouldn’t it be even better to shoot them again?”

And then there is the film’s other apocalypse, its physical end. We find Anna’s lighter, brighter double babysitting Bob while his parents are away (she is Bob’s elementary school teacher, an inexplicable dead ringer for Mark’s wife). In her apartment, in the middle of making Bob a meal, someone knocks. Bob (whose understated performance acts as a kind of inadequate counterweight to rest of the film) begs her not to answer the door. When she playfully refuses, he flees the table, flees the scene. As he runs, he keeps repeating his plea:

“Dooonnn’t oppppeeeennn! Dooonnn’t oppppeeeennn!”

He flees to the bathroom, to an already-full tub (earlier in the film he had taken delight in showing his parents how long he could hold his breath underwater), instinctively preferring to fling himself facedown in the tub—to apparently drown himself—rather than meet his father’s dark double at the door. Some monster he cannot comprehend. Instead, like an animal getting a whiff, he registers, processes, retreats—him not having the words but still knowing as sure as shit:

His parents’ apocalypse has come finally for him.

The end.

Funny, I don’t remember him being so bad in Omen III: The Final Conflict, but having watched John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession in recent succession, I’m now of the firm opinion that Sam Neill should be forcibly restrained from making any more horror movies; they bring out the hammy worst in the man. Nevertheless, even Neill is upstaged here by the extraordinary supporting performance – and I don’t intend that as a compliment – of Heinz Bennent, quite the most entertaining piece of scenery-chewing I have witnessed in a good long while. This wasn’t too bad a movie, actually: the atmosphere is nicely oppressive, Isabelle Adjani certainly throws herself into her role and the restless camerawork is marvellous throughout. What the film lacks, however, is a little subtlety and a lot of control; it’s shrill and hysterical from beginning to end, often comically so. It’s very apt that Possession is frequently compared to David Cronenberg’s The Brood – and there are, indeed, similarities – because Cronenberg immediately springs to mind when one considers which other director might have been able to make a better movie out of this; Polanski is another.

I was a little let down with this one because I had heard so many great things about it. First off, Isabelle gave my new favorite performance by a female. Her acting in this is flawless and she catapulted to one of my favorite actresses after simply viewing this. However, the rest of the cast didn’t do quite so well. I’m not sure if it’s simply because Isabelle was so great that she made the others look bad but everyone else seems to be phoning it in. Sam Neill (in an early role for him) didn’t quite do it for me, his acting came across as stagy, fake and just overall, very ‘actor-y’. He helped create, what I thought, were some very cheesy moments (just watch him shake himself violently off of a bed and try not to laugh). The other character that Isabelle was cheating on Sam with was hard to take serious at all. I understand what the director and the actor playing him were trying to go for but again, it just came across as an actor flailing his limbs for no reason and definitely took me out of the film.

Any time the ‘horror’ elements popped up in this movie, it was astonishing and captivating. There just seemed to be too much uninteresting filler and I wish the screenplay had been better. There is a lot of marital arguing in this film, which was great in some parts, but I can’t help but feel that it repeated itself too often without much variation and caused it to be a bit boring. And this is coming from a guy who thinks Scenes From a Marriage is the best thing that Bergman has ever done in his career. The key difference though is in the Bergman film/series, they kept things interesting and there was action in the dialogue spoken by the characters which continued to build and build until it became so tense, you couldn’t turn away. Here, some of it comes across as pointless, regular arguing which does not seem to add much after it’s been repeated many times. This makes up most of the first 45 minutes.

I’ll be honest, the first 45 minutes can be a bit of a slog in some parts and I almost turned off the film wondering what all the fuss was about. Thankfully I stayed with it for a little bit longer and that’s when things started to unravel a bit. But any amazing “Oh shit!” moment was followed by a couple scenes that made me want to take a nap. I admire the fact that the film seems to defy genres and mixes drama, suspense, horror and a little black comedy but the mix is extremely uneven. Overall, the film had some amazing scenes that I will never forget but because the entire thing is so uneven, it’s hard for me to recommend this film to anyone and makes me hesitate to watch it again.