Review #157: 'Possession' (1981)

Ukrainian director Andrzej Zulawski's first and only English language film, is a strange mixture of horror and drama. The film begins as Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna's (Isabelle Adjani) marriage is deteriorating. What proceeds is a series of increasingly brutal arguments, as Mark unravels Anna's infidelities that she has been embroiled in over the past year. Their son, Bob (Michael Hogben) is caught in between the feuding couple. As Mark breaks down in almost infantile ways to begin with, he employs a detective to follow Anna to find out who she has been having an affair with. Here he meets Heinrich (Heinz Bennent - giving a fantastically deranged performance as "zen" superior; stumbling around in a strangely amusingly contorted way), who has been at least one of the persons Anna has been sleeping with.

The first half of the film sees Mark's paranoia escalate, as he attempts to discover Anna's secrets. Each of their meetings are fraught with anguish and violence. As the secrets unravel, it becomes apparent that Anna has a clandestine apartment, where she has been seemingly having sexual relations with a tentacled "monster". What transpires is a vicious hatred of men, as Anna murders and dismembers men, perhaps to feed the bed-ridden monster.

The ambiguities within the text of the film are great. As the protagonist in the film is male, are we to consider that his instability after the breakup creates these base images of his wives "monster" lover? Has she simply become a monster herself within his broken mind, so that he projects these images of male slaughter onto her? It has been stated by the director that at the time of the creation of the film, he too was going through a marriage break-up. Perhaps these are his fantasised thoughts on the realities of this very real trauma.

Isabelle Adjani gives an incredibly powerful performance, moving from serene, to a very animalistic frenzy of outbursts. She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for this film. The film also became embroiled in the British video nasties debacle, as it was placed upon the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) list of banned films. A strange inclusion amongst the "hard-core" gore films. The film plays mostly as a dark drama, a fantasised male projection of women's infidelity. It has been compared to celebrated relationship break-down films such as Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973). In it's depiction of body horror, it has been likened to David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979). I wondered, within the moments of horror within Anna's secret apartment, whether Clive Barker may have been influenced by the film to create the fundamental idea of Hellraiser (1987).

Anna's tenticular "lover" may feed upon her victims to create a whole new being. In the finale of the film, she presents the dying Mark with a doppelganger, stating, "It is finished now". We could read this as the total end of the relationship. Or, we could see this as her way (within his own mind) of creating a superior yet visually similar man. A man devastated by the break-up may not be able to deal with the idea of his former wife living with a totally different man, so therefore he wants to create a man that is his mirror image.

A shockingly forgotten film, portrays the destruction of a relationship in all of its debilitating reality. For a period after such an upheaval, nothing really seems real. Perhaps the film has largely been forgotten within the UK because of its inclusion into the video nasties list. A bunch of films that most people would have no interest in viewing. And those interested in the gore-filled nasties, would probably be disappointed with the beauty of the film. It is almost a perfect portrayal of devastation, and the implications, and horrors projected onto the fall-out of long term relationships. Beautiful, disturbing, but essential cinema.


Directed by: Andrzej Zulawski
Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen
Country: France/West Germany

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy