"Possession", Dir: Andrzej Zulawski, 1981

I'd started watching Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film "Possession" a while ago but was put off after seeing the widely distributed YouTube clip featuring Isabelle Adjani experiencing some sort of violent psychic breakdown in an East German tube subway, which is admittedly a tour de force of acting but is also very disturbing to watch and perhaps suggests that the film is about something else when viewed in the context of the film's title. So I decided to carry on where I left off, perhaps inadvisably immediately after watching episode 4 of "Alien Earth" that capitalises on the "body horror" trope established in "Alien" which itself was inspired by the excessively violent low budget "schlock" horror films of the late 1970's, most notably Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". I'm not a huge fan of those films or of films based on occult themes where the attraction may be sensationalist and have a visceral quality leading to a cathartic effect in the viewer and no other deeper meaning beyond that.

It's easy to dismiss "Possession" as such a film, in the context of the period in which it was made and superficially speaking it's hard to discern any deeper meaning in a plot that starts with a marital breakdown between Sam Neill's Eastern Bloc spy "Mark" and his wife, "Anna" played by Isabelle Adjani and descends into madness, set in bleak East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My overwhelming impression is that it felt very much like it may have originated in a graphic novel due to the stilted delivery of dialogue, stylised physical performances of both the leads and cinematographic style but there is nothing in the director's background that would suggest it began that way.

At times Neill's performance verges on the comical in contrast to Adjani's which is completely over the top, but what is clear is that they perform their roles with complete conviction in the face of a bizarre storyline that fuses kitchen sink drama with a sci-fi horror theme, which of course is necessary for this type of story to avoid it appearing absurd.

Critics of the film have pointed out that the themes explored in the film mirror the political situation in post-war Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and that Zulawski employs metaphor and allegory to depict a resulting moral and spiritual collapse embodied by "Anna" choosing to embark on a bizarre extramarital affair with what turns out to be a grotesque tentacled entity in an abandoned apartment in one of the many decaying buildings that typified East Germany at the time while her husband (Neill) is away on business. On his return from an assignment as a spy for the state "Mark" seeks to repair his broken relationship with "Anna" out of concern for their young son "Bob" but she has decided that she cannot continue living with him. The shock of this drives Mark to despair and he spirals into a depression, self-neglect and paranoia after she confesses that she has a lover and intends leaving him for good. Mark appoints a private detective to trail Anna with the intention of discovering where she goes for her clandestine romantic visits, initially suspecting another former lover of hers, Heinrich. In the meantime Anna's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and her mental state starts to unravel in way that reminded me of Catherine Deneuve's single-handed performance in fellow Polish director Roman Polanski's "Repulsion", with its implication of sexual abuse as an underlying cause of mental illness. Much like "Repulsion" the reasons for the mental breakdown are open to interpretation and all we know is what is revealed in the horrifying penultimate moment where we and Mark witness Anna in the embrace of a grotesque tentacled entity, created by the noted visual effects designer, Carlo Rambaldi ("E.T"), where she is seemingly taunting him repeatedly with the word "almost", and its implication that she is on the verge of orgasm.

Another aspect of the film is that it features doppelgangers of both Ann and Mark - Adjani also plays "Helen" a school teacher at "Bob's" school who embarks on a brief affair with Mark after he is struck by her resemblance to Anna. She represents the archetype of the perfect wife and is angelic in both appearance and manner - she is always dressed in white - and looks after "Bob" in his birth mothers' absence, in contrast to Anna's preference for wearing black and having episodes that appear to suggest the stereotype of possession which reaches a climax in the previously mentioned Tube tunnel sequence. Anna's deteriorating mental state leads her to commit murder, first by luring the private detective hired by Mark to the decaying apartment where he is driven half mad after glimpsing her monstrous "lover", followed by the private detective's employer and gay lover and later when Mark, driven by jealousy, tells Heinrich to go there and where he also sees the creature before Anna injures him severely with a knife before he manages to escape. Unaware at this stage of the truth about Anna, Mark, by now driven to desperation, decides to destroy the apartment by igniting gas from a cooker there and is successful. Mark later receives a phone call from Anna and an address and it is here that he witnesses the ugly truth. Curiously resigned to the fact that Anna has made her choice, no matter how bizarre and inexplicable, his mental state collapses completely and he embarks on a spree of destruction that ends for both Mark and Anna in a shoot out with the police. It is here that we first see the doppelganger of Mark who finishes off the dying couple with a gun shot before escaping and we are left to assume that "he" is in fact the entity.

The film ends at the apartment of "Helen" where she is playing with "Bob" and has to answer the doorbell. "Bob" tells her not to answer it since he seems instinctively to know that it is the Mark doppelganger so Helen hesitates and the closing moments of the film are to the sounds of aerial bombardment and some approaching apocalypse.

"Possession" is certainly a film that stays with you after watching it and it can be interpreted in a number of ways - the setting of East Germany is no mere stylistic choice, for example. Perhaps on one level it is a political statement that uses allegory and metaphor, though in a uniquely grotesque manner, but equally it could be viewed as Anna's desire for freedom within a restrictive relationship with a husband who is literally an instrument of the state and expects her to conform to the State's notion of the ideal wife, something personified in "Helen". Zulawski draws on folk traditions about a wayward woman as either a witch who consorts with the devil, here depicted as the tentacled entity, or a whore, whereas she is merely expressing a desire for freedom from a repressive arrangement and the resulting inevitable mental decline from that. This could equally be viewed at a metaphor for repression under Communism, or Fascism for that matter, and as a spy, Mark becomes a tool of state surveillance, hinted at several times in the film by shots of uniformed soldiers peering at Mark and Anna's apartment from the other side of the Berlin Wall. The tentacled entity may be a metaphor for the freedoms and promise of the West and Anna seeks its embrace but it is also a threat that carries with it another form of enslavement.

Definitely not for the faint hearted, "Possession" is an interesting entry in the "body horror" genre and is notable for the intensity of Isabelle Adjani's performance.

"Possession", Dir: Andrzej Zulawski, 1981

Criterion Channel, MUBI

Ravi Swami 05/09/25