POSSESSION (1981) HORROR FILM REVIEW

POSSESSION (1981) – Halloween Month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog with a review of the thoroughly bizarre cult film Possession, from Polish director Andrzej Zulawksi. Because I review everything from mild horror films to extreme works, I’m offering my usual COURTESY WARNING for readers who prefer less transgressive movies. 

Possession deals with very ugly adult situations and violence plus extremely dark topics. As much as I enjoy the works of David Lynch, Zulawski goes far beyond the weirdest and most unappetizing aspects of Lynch’s films. Eraserhead comes closest to capturing the disturbing and haunting air of an Andrzej Zulawski production.

I’m far from alone in praising Possession to the Heavens, so my take on it may seem like a mere rehashing for those who are already passionate fans. However, in my opinion only the full 2 hour and 4-minute version is worth watching, not the trimmed-down versions.   

Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani play a romantic couple whose disintegrating relationship erodes their sanity and finds them trapped within horrors they never would have dreamed could be real.

The backstory to the making of Possession has become almost legendary but for newbies I’ll do a brief summary. Zulawski not only had just gone through a crushing breakup himself when his lady cheated on him, but he was also blacklisted by the communist authorities in Poland for making a film they considered critical of communism.   

Branded with that figurative scarlet letter the auteur not only was banned from filmmaking and other creative ventures but was virtually untouchable. Hiring Zulawski even in a blue-collar job would have brought unwanted and disapproving attention to his employers. 

Friends helped get him to free countries like West Germany and France, where Andrzej began to make Possession aka “the breakup movie from Hell.” Zulawski served up a surreal nightmare about romantic betrayal, body horror, self-mutilation and a grotesque monstrosity.

Anna (Adjani) and Mark (Neill) find their relationship falling apart because his emotional distance – caused by the secrets he must keep in his role as an intelligence agent – helps drive her into the arms of a self-styled guru (Heinz Bennent).     

There are intense arguments over, among other things, Anna’s failure to keep their home uncluttered and their son cleaned & fed. Along with the infidelity, Mark and Anna lapse into a horrific “sex life” of battering and cutting each other as well as indulging in self-mutilation.

Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani make an attractive couple, but the sight of their fit bodies writhing and convulsing while bloodied up are more disturbing than many far gorier scenes in other horror flicks. Zulawski’s technique involved having his actors behave bizarrely and absurdly, like the performances David Lynch squeezes out of his cast members.

The dysfunctional mating rituals that Mark and Anna have sunk to ultimately result in the notorious scene of Adjani throwing herself against walls and contorting her body in eerie ways in the subway. At last, her body bleeding and leaking milky white substances as if in a perverse miscarriage, she sees those fluids congeal into an inhuman mass. 

Anna gets the monstrosity home with her, where it continues to mutate, soon becoming a tentacled quasi-golem which she takes as a lover. Heinrich, the man she’s been cheating on Mark with, is floored and grossed out when Anna, with deranged equanimity, tells him the creature is very tired because it’s been making love to her all night long.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Believe it or not, things get even weirder and more grotesque from there. Unlike Heinrich, Mark at first tries to be “understanding” about the hideous creature that Anna now shares her bed with (Simp!). The golem begins resembling Mark just as another such entity begins to resemble Anna.

Utter madness now reigns, and amid an invasion by East Germany into West Germany, Mark and Anna meet their bloody end. Most disturbingly, their child is horrified and flees upstairs from the false Mark, which he senses is not his real father.

Interpretations of Possession vary wildly, but no matter what deeper meaning you may read into this haunting film its imagery sets up housekeeping in your mind and refuses to leave. It’s not for the squeamish.

People committed to finding rational explanations for everything in even the most surreal films often point to Mark’s job as an intelligence operative and claim he and Anna were unwilling human guinea pigs for some kind of biological experiments. Obviously, though, such mental gymnastics aren’t necessary for appreciating Possession.

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