Possession

Everything is either fractured or in the process of splitting apart. It is the final decade of the Cold War, and Mark (Sam Neill), a spy, returns to West Berlin, the more prosperous, though eerily vacant, half of a divided city, where his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), is inexplicably asking for a divorce. Initially, the situation is disorienting but amicable. Soon, however, Mark and Anna will be fighting over the welfare of their son, Bob (Michael Hogben); Mark will discover and tussle with Anna’s eccentric lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent); and both Mark and Anna will tumble headlong into flamboyant expressions of mental illness, exacting violence on themselves and each other—in one especially memorable instance with the help of an electric carving knife. Their bloody mutual fugue states are magnified by the emergence of doppelgängers: Bob’s teacher, Helen, is a dead ringer for Anna, while Anna, holing up in a derelict Kreuzberg apartment beside the Wall, births a number of Lovecraftian creatures, a second Mark among them. Madness, grief, obsession: in the sustained fugue state that is Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), nothing is stable, reality is illegible, and the only thing graspable is visceral emotional turmoil. I love this movie. I might understand this movie.

The ghosts of various marriages haunt Possession. Żuławski wrote it during his agonizing divorce from actress Małgorzata Braunek. (The purging of post-marital resentments in the form of fantastical horror gives Possession a special kinship to David Cronenberg’s similarly autobiographical 1979 film, The Brood.) The film’s gorgeous poster was designed by Żuławski’s first wife, Barbara Baranowska, whose first husband, Adolf Rudnicki, inspired a character Żuławski eventually wrote out of the script. Possession’s bravura, spiraling cinematography was helmed by Adjani’s then-husband Bruno Nuytten, who would go on to make his directorial debut with Camille Claudel (1988), which also starred Adjani, who was then set to marry Daniel Day-Lewis. Many key talents involved in Possession testified to not understanding the film, but every one of them intuited something fundamental to this portrait of martial collapse and the intolerable unknowability of the beloved.

Neill’s performance is astonishing, beautifully graded, go-for-broke. After the couple parts, he shakes violently and sweats profusely, as though in the grip of delirium tremens. The scene where he erupts into rabid fury in a many-mirrored restaurant, plowing through tables and chairs until the kitchen staff wrestles him to the floor, is anxiogenic and thrilling. But Mark’s mania is ultimately dwarfed by Anna’s. Panting, flailing, collapsing, gyrating, her splattery fit in a subway station, exuding the anguish and loss of miscarriage, demonstrates an arresting physicality rare in cinema. Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes and a César for a role that’s part of a lineage that echoes Daliah Lavi’s work in Il demonio (1963) and anticipates Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day (2001)—performances that wrest notions of female hysteria from psychanalytic condescension and shuttle them into the realm of Grotowskian opera. The men in Anna’s life regard her as a kind of property, but by this film’s mayhem-filled finale, Adjani’s incendiary dervish is clearly no one’s possession. 🩸