Possession (1981)
Directed by Andrzej Żuławski
A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.
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5 films that influenced Possession
What critics say influenced Possession
In fact, much of Possession puts me in mind of a simply brilliant film with even less narrative coherence, David Lynch's 1976 Eraserhead , which was similarly inspired by a crisis of manhood in the filmmaker's personal life (his ambivalence over being a father).
The film shares DNA with Polanski's "Repulsion," where Catherine Deneuve descended into murderous madness.
The other art house movie on the Nasties list, Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein , at least has the benefit of being deliberately and enthusiastically trashy, splashing around in horror movie iconography, even if it was in a hugely satirical manner.
Most of us probably first think of David Cronenberg's 1979 The Brood when the phrase "misogynist body horror film made by a bitter divorcée" comes up in conversation - heck, it happened to me three times just this afternoon!
Divisiveness and duplicity are at the heart of ?u?awski's notorious cult film, and Possession's dramatic structure is almost as schizoid as its protagonists, married couple Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani), whose relationship inexplicably comes apart: The film's first half comes on like Scenes from a Marriage as directed by Lars von Trier and played at 2x speed, a lacerating depiction of disintegration both marital and psychological, while the latter half steadily morphs into Repulsion by way of Cronenberg's The Brood when Anna holes up in a rundown flat and proceeds to dispatch any man brazen enough to disturb her love-in with a tentacular monstrosity she most likely miscarried months earlier.
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Save | E-mail | Print | Most Popular | RSS | Reprints Film Review: Possession Positioned as a horror movie upon its initial U.S. release (in a truncated version), this delirious psychodrama—imagine Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by way of Lars von Trier's Antichrist—still defies classification and will polarize viewers as thoroughly as it did 30 years ago.
Positioned as a horror movie upon its initial U.S. release (in a truncated version), this delirious psychodrama—imagine Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by way of Lars von Trier's Antichrist—still defies classification and will polarize viewers as thoroughly as it did 30 years ago.