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.