Possession (1983)

Everyone has its limits, that's mine. Isabelle Adjani is amazing. The direction is a real piece of art. However, this movie is definitely not for the faint-hearted.

One of the hands-down most bizarre movies you'll see in your entire life, Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION is a remarkable film that resists efforts to pigeonhole it into a genre. Is it a film about marriage breakdown, a la the great European art-house directors of old? Is it a slimy, slithery outer-space horror flick? Is it a crime flick, like the '70s Italian police movies, with private eyes, motorbike chases, and stunts? Or is it a character study of madness and self-hatred, a la Polanski's REPULSION? The answer is none of these and all of them. POSSESSION is a one of a film and a guaranteed love-it or hate-it experience.For what it's worth, I thought it was a really good film, even if it was once of those efforts that make you feel uncomfortable and, in a way, leave you wishing you'd never seen it (I felt the same about THE EXORCIST). Sometimes horror can be just too effective. The marriage disintegration scenes were the worst part of the film for me. Zulawski has his actors shout and scream their way through scene after scene, almost brawling in some instances, hitting and cutting each other and trashing their apartment. Don't expect subtlety here – characters have sudden mood swings and can transform from caring lovers to violent psychopaths in a split second. Isabelle Adjani carries the film, and I actually find her the most frightening thing on screen: her blank stare and icy demeanour give her an almost alien look. You end up really convinced that SHE is mad, so it may be one of the best performances out there.Sam Neill fares less role in a kind of up-and-down role, in the same year that he made his name in OMEN III: THE FINAL CONFLICT. Is he the hero? Is he the villain? Again, he's both and neither, and while I do like this actor a lot, some of his overacting is a little embarrassing. For his worth, though, Zulawski has assembled a great supporting cast of bit players and weirdos, with the highlight being Heinz Bennent's bisexual druggie. This man should have had an Oscar for the creepy character he plays here! One of the main characters in the film is a rarely-seen monster, a weird tentacled squid man animated by great effects from technician Carlo Rombaldi. This is a fantastic creation, even better as we only see it in a handful of moments, and once again Rombaldi has surpassed himself, here at the very highlight of his career.Where to begin with the rest of the movie? Some of it is nasty, with Adjani committing bloody murders and detectives lurking around; it feels like a giallo, something Argento would make, perhaps. The ending throws in some superbly-shot action scenes which come as a nice pay-off for the slow build-up. The climax has an evil doppelganger that reminded me of the alien in PREY. Other parts are just unnecessary – the subway miscarriage is way overdone and completely icky. No wonder this film became a 'video nasty' in Britain for a little while. The film has lots of odd undercurrents and there are even some comic bits. Homosexuality is a running theme, as is parenthood. The ending, with its sounds of bombs dropping, leaves the reader to make their own mind up about just what on earth is going on. I can't define POSSESSION, and I can't begin to describe it, but it scared and disturbed me which meant it worked as a horror flick.

To call the film an ordeal sounds like one of the most hackneyed criticisms you could give to a bad film, but in some instances, you could have a beautifully sinister film, which is an important piece of cinema unmissable, and much like Irreversible, a film which is heavily influenced by one particular scene in this, ordeal is just the right word to summarise how I felt after seeing this.Mark and Anna are already on the brink of divorce. Mark returns home after a mysterious trip, only to discover that in his absence Anna has been conducting an affair. Anna's friend Margie has been taking care of their son, Bob, but refuses to tell Mark the name or address of the other man. After several fights Mark eventually discovers that an obnoxious 'guru' named Heinrich is Anna's secret lover and the two have a confrontation. Mark is also astonished to discover that Bob's teacher, Helen, looks identical to his wife. Soon Anna disappears again and this time even Heinrich doesn't know where she's gone. Mark hires a detective to find her and the terrible truth is gradually revealed........It's understandable that the director was going through a personal crisis whilst he wrote the film, every last drop of resentment, anger, distress, pain, and denial is here on screen, and in some way, he could probably emulate himself in each character that is portrayed on screen.Divorce is the main context of the films narrative here, and divorce from the point of view of someone who has had the worst act a married person could commit to their spouse, adultery. Adultery here could be portrayed as the monster that Anna is hiding for the majority of the film, after all anybody who has committed adultery would know that it is a burden to carry around with them for the length of the time they keep it a secret.Helen, on the other hand could be how Mark remembers Anna from all the good time, and when he reverts back to Anna, it's just a case of where did it all go wrong.The film becomes more frustrating for Anna and Mark, and the audience, as we get to the bottom of Anna's secrets, and the scene in the subway station is one of the most haunting and disturbing scenes you could endure, and Noé owes a lot to this film for his scene in Irreversible.The final scene is both heartbreaking and mind boggling. Parents, after divorce, sometimes change for the better, and for the worse, hence the exclusion of old Mark and Anna, and we have a doppelgänger Mark, and Helen, who both in turn appear to be the perfect people, but with sinister undertones.The light in Helens eyes and the noises she hears at the end of the film could indicate the birth of the new Nuclear family, and Bob 'drowning' himself could indicate the prison like feel of coming to terms with parents not being together.It's not for all tastes, that's for sure, and it left me feeling pretty low about the world after, but if you can stomach the tone of the film, it's really worth while.

I'm pretty active on Twitter and over the years have accumulated a lot of "followers" on there that I would consider to be "cinephiles". For those who have never encountered the term, call them amateur film scholars. Some really are film scholars with the degrees to prove it. Some write reviews for blogs and various sites and some are just fans of movie, who have gone far past the typical popular Hollywood pablum to dive into the history and culture of film. Some might call these people "film snobs". In a lot of ways I would consider myself to be one. One of the horror movies that I have seen a lot of these friends tout through the years is POSSESSION and it was with anticipation that I finally was able to find it on TMC and got my chance to watch it.I can only say I'm left more than a little disappointed. This is truly the kind of movie that only hardcore "film lovers" would appreciate. It's the sort of movie that's an acquired taste, developed through years of watching similar films and I just didn't have the patience to sift through the layers and find the value in this movie.We begin in what seems to be the middle of the story, as the guy from Jurassic Park returns home after years spent in government service to find that his marriage has hit bottom, his wife has been cheating on him and divorce is imminent. In the middle of this rocky relationship is a young child, who displays very little natural action. He is almost an object in the movie, meant only to serve the purpose of becoming another something for this couple to fight over.Much of the movie is spent in endless conversation, sometimes between two characters and sometimes with characters just babbling to themselves. There is not a normal person in this entire film. Everyone is neurotic, obsessed and "possessed" by various forces. It becomes an unnerving experience for the viewer after awhile. The wife is falling apart mentally and showing obvious cracks. Her behavior is completely irrational. She screams and shouts, talks nonsense and acts in bizarre ways that tend to grate on the viewer's nerves.The husband is reacting in obsessive ways, shown frequently rocking himself back and forth with a blank look on his face. This is carried out to such an extreme that it almost felt like a farce from a FAMILY GUY skit. His behavior is, also, erratic as he tries to cope with this failing marriage. At times, he is the focal point of the plot and the only "normal" thing, but then goes to extremes of behavior even worse than his wife's. Then, we meet the "lover", the wife's boyfriend, who is is as much unhinged as the rest of them, bouncing from an almost flirtatious encounter with the husband, to spouting college philosophy course views on life and love.Somehow, this all leads to the wife having a third (second?) affair with something out of a Lovecraft short story, a tentacled, vegetative bloody monster that feeds on human blood. She gives her body, her blood and her lovers to this new monster, who is bedridden and must be brought his dinner by this young woman. None of this is really explained and the director never intends to do so, because it's all some metaphor that we're supposed to think through about the nature of love and the forces that both bring us together and tear us apart.I'm all for art in my horror and appreciate a film that has layers for me to tear through, but this movie is too perturbing. By the end point, I want to kill all of them myself just to end their babbling and their drama queen behavior. By the time we get to the end, I no longer even cared what the director was trying to say and just wanted it to be over.