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The implosion of a marriage is never pretty, but surely the act of a husband and wife seeing their relationship break down has never been as spectacularly ugly as the one portrayed in Possession. Sure, movies like Kramer Vs Kramer and Marriage Story prove to be deeply painful watches as love slowly erodes to pain and a couple rapidly find themselves in the confusing emotional void of seeing their other half become a hated enemy – but they’re both an oasis of calm compared to the searing, surreal madness found within Andrzej Żulawski’s jaw dropping movie.
Taking the collapse of a marriage and then smearing blood, slime and other unsettling fluids all over it, Possession is quite unlike anything I’d ever seen before, as it oscillates, undulates and squirms wildly between cruel arthouse, hardcore body horror and melodramatic marital strife to create an experience you might want to avoid watching on your next anniversary.
Mark is a spy who, after a lengthy mission has been completed, campaigns to his superiors to be released so he can return to to his wife and child in their home in West Berlin. However, his return is brutally marred when he discovers that his spouse, Anna, is seeing someone else and wants them to separate. Aghast at this shock revelation, Mark initially insisists on turning over everything – including full custody of his son, Bob – to Anna between bursts of histrionic rage, which eventually hits him so hard he spirals into around three weeks of hard drinking. But when he emerges from the epic stupor, he discovers that Bob has been left in their apartment alone for long periods of time to fend for himself, and resolves to partially reverse his decision and become his son’s primary caregiver. However, every time Anna periodically returns home, Mark makes attempts to convince his wife to end her affair and return to him, the conversation invariably turns into the rawest, volcanic, domestic arguments you’ve ever seen.
However, from here, things progressively start to get weirder and weirder. First, Mark meets Bob’s teacher, Helen, who looks virtually identical to his estranged, erratic wife, and then he goes to visits Anna’s lover, Heinrich, who proves to be an eccentric, pretentious spiritual type and who also ends up being proficient in martial arts after the confrontation gets violent. However, while Heinrich is the man Anna was seeing once upon a time, it isn’t the other man she’s seeing now, and after their latest argument spirals into domestic abuse, Mark decides to hire private detectives to get to the bottom of discovering who has managed to woo his wife away from her family so completely.
However, as everyone is about to discover, the other man isn’t so much of a who as a what, and this already stressful story of a collapsing relationship is about to take a tumble into the realms of body horror in ways that’ll take more than alimony payments to fix…
I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt, that Andrzej Żulawski’s Possession is one of the most fucked-up movie experiences I’ve ever had. Even long before the really weird shit starts to kick in, the film insists on being one of the most opaque and esoteric looks at a crumbling marriage that you’re ever likely to see, and the tone is instantly set by the dreary backdrop of shots of the Berlin Wall, which adds to the inexplicable claustrophobia the story exudes. This is a film about people who are trapped by their emotions and Żulawski wastes no time in having both Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani verbally tear strips off each other as Mark struggles to accept that his wife suddenly loves someone else. However, because the entirety of Possession is filmed like we’re trying to process it through the strange prism of a deranged fever dream, everything feels insanely off kilter. Both Neill and Adjani deliver their lines like they’re in a play and frequently tip into full mania and hysteria while doing it; meanwhile Żulawski’s camera sprints alongside them and whirls around them like a carousel in order to ramp up the anxiety. Dream logic rules here, and it gets progressively stranger the deeper we get.
While Mark goes from frustrated cuck to obsessive enabler and Anna’s secret relationship inevitably drives her to murder, both actors genuinely seem like they’re having actual metal breakdowns and when you add the absurd, pretentious Heinrich and a pair of doomed, homosexual private detectives, what’s left of reality checks out in order to take a nightmarish leave of absence. But there’s still even deeper levels of surrealism to plumb and Possession doesn’t truly show its misshapen hand until we discover exactly who Anna’s been sleeping with. The revelation that a major corner in this love triangle (or love square, technically) is a giant worm monster with writhing tentacles who Anna regularly meets for long bouts of epic sex is what finally sends the film into insanity-ville, but what’s truly impressive is that everyone involved stubbornly refuses to let matters slide into schlock.
Everything is played with a completely straight face that adds to the disturbing nature of it all and as a result, both the leads deliver even more phenomenal work. A flashback that reveals that Anna gave birth to the malformed creature (which she refers to as her “Faith”) is stunning as the actress turns utterly feral before our very eyes, thrashing wildly like an animal in a trap before leaking various viscous fluids from various places. It’s literally one of the wildest things I’ve ever witnessed within the realms of horror and it’s made all the more raw by the marital drama that surrounds it. In fact, the only film that I can think of that is remotely similar is the similar mix of familial drama, lustful body horror and eldritch evil Clive Barker utilised in Hellraiser, but while that film delivered its otherworldly horrors via the strains of a dark fairy tale, Żulawski goes for a sense of super-heightened realism that feels utterly unrestrained.
Of course, you wouldn’t expect a film that contains multiple murder, domestic abuse and a scene where Sam Neill witnesses his wife eagerly get it on with a squirming worm demon to end on a happy note – and Żulawski is certainly willing to oblige by turning up the mind searing chaos – but just when you think Possesion can’t get any more insane, the movie throws in gun fights, car crashes, doppelgängers and evidence that both Neill and Adjani can get even more crazy. Those not on the wavelength to absorb such a histrionic tone that refuses let up for two hours, may find Possession to be something of a chore, especially as logic and explanations are deliberately thin on the ground. But for those that want something cruel, confounding, vicious and utterly unpredictable, Possession is something of a must-have.
Probably detailing the most destructive marriage break up in cinema history, Żulawski delivers a horror/drama so wild, it almost defies classification. Not since the early horror works of David Cronenberg has the realms of arthouse and horror been so nimbly twinned – or should I say married – and if the worst you’ve ever experienced from a divorce is a nasty court case, count yourself fucking lucky…
