‘Inhuman ecstasy fulfilled.’
Possession is a 1981 horror drama film about a woman exhibiting increasingly disturbing behaviour after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
The movie was directed by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski from a screenplay co-written with Frederic Tuten. Żuławski has stated that he wrote the screenplay in the midst of a messy divorce.
The Gaumont-Oliane-Marianne-Soma Film co-production stars Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen and Heinz Bennent.
The film was controversial when first released, and heavily edited for distribution in the United States. After an initial limited theatre release in the United Kingdom, Possession was banned as one of the notorious so-called ‘video nasties’, although it was later released uncut on VHS in 1999. It gradually developed a minor cult following among arthouse enthusiasts with a taste for visceral horror.
In 2024, the film was remade by Indonesian filmmakers as Possession: Kerasukan.
Plot:
With their marriage in pieces, Anna and Mark’s tense relationship has become a psychotic descent into screaming matches, violence and self-mutilation.
Believing his wife’s only lover is the sinister Heinrich, Mark is unaware of the demonic, tentacled creature that Anna has embarked on an affair with. The unhinged woman visits her monstrous lover in a deserted Berlin apartment and will stop at nothing to protect it…
Our review:
Possession is ostensibly about many things, but at the heart of it is a marital breakdown. Sam Neill is Mark, a likely government agent (it’s never really explained) who returns home from a mission to try and patch up his failing marriage to Anna (Isabelle Adjani). Anna has a lover, the slimy Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), and it’s fair to say that neither of them is handling the situation well – Mark vegetates in a hotel room for three weeks, Anna leaves their young son alone in the flat, and they have intense physical confrontations as Mark flips between pushing her away and begging her to return. But it soon turns out that she has moved on from Heinrich, and now has a mysterious new partner – a grotesque, evolving tentacled creature that she will do anything to protect.
Possession is a remarkable film. Set in a grey, depressing West Berlin (the Wall is literally right outside the couple’s window), it would be a deranged, intense film even without the bizarre creature – if you think you’ve ever had a bad breakup, this film might make you think again. Neill and Adjani are both at full throttle, reaching levels of hysteria so overwhelming that you worry for their sanity at times, Adjani especially going all out as she not so much descends as plummets into madness. The infamous ‘birth’ scene is rightly notorious for the level of dementia the actress shows, and never loses its power.
While not a straight horror film, Possession certainly ventures into that area and does so impressively. Carlo Rambaldi’s monster is worryingly authentic, and the violence has a sickly reality to it – possibly because so much of it is quite intimate and small scale (the scene where Adjani takes an electric knife to her neck is still shocking). The creature could’ve derailed the film, but given the deranged nature of what we’d seen too far, its appearance isn’t that odd, and Carlo Rambaldi’s creature is so weird, so grotesque that its appearance adds to the overall shock value.
Zuwalski’s direction is thankfully restrained – he lets the wildness happen within the characters, and the film itself has a sedate, cold feel to it. There’s a political element to this story – it was his first project after leaving Communist Poland and it’s clear that the evil he sees in the story isn’t just that involving tentacled creatures – but it’s not laid out in a heavy-handed manner, instead of making up a part of the general insanity (after all, what could be more insane than a city split in two by a giant wall?).
As powerful now as it was on original release in 1981, Possession is a disturbing, astonishing, sometimes darkly comic and often moving tour-de-force that straddles the arthouse and the grindhouse while ultimately transcending both. A must-see movie.
David Flint, MOVIES & MANIA
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” …a barely watchable stew of unmediated mad-eyed acting and dialogue so laughably pretentious one has to check that the film isn’t a parody.” Jonathan Rigby, Euro Gothic book
Buy DVD: Amazon.co.uk
Filming locations:
Berlin, West Germany
Technical specs:
2 hours 4 minutes
Audio: Mono
Aspect ratio: 1.66: 1
Trailer:
Free to watch online on YouTube [4K UHD]:
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