Horror Watch: Possession (1981)

Watched:  10/05/2025

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrzej Zulawski

Possession (1981) is one of those movies you see get routinely mentioned, but very rarely with *specifics* as to why it's on lists and recommended. 

Look, this is not a movie where one bops along with an A-B-C plot.  It's absolutely one of those movies - maybe like Inland Empire - where folks sure seem certain about what it is about but nobody agrees, including critics.  It is an easy movie to get engrossed in and like, mostly because it falls just on this side of adding up, and your brain is working overtime trying to stitch the pieces together.  Is it religious symbolism?  Is it not?  Is this a commentary on Berlin or using Berlin to make a point about divorce?  What's with...  you know...  the, uh... creature, I guess?

I *think* I get that this is a movie about the raw pain of divorce and finding the dark part of each other and oneself in the madness of a love and life being cut in two.  But I am not going to type here and lie that I got all of it.  And it sure seems like someone making sense of a very personal story with no interest in making it universally accessible.

The film is about, on paper, a man, Mark (Sam Neil), who comes home from acting as a spy, to find his wife is ending their marriage.  What starts as a clear emotional wall turns into hysteria, all of which might mean a clean break, but there's a son - a son Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is furious she has with Mark now that she's with a new man, Heinrich.  

As Anna becomes more irrational, so, too, does Mark follow suit, putting on his best to try to achieve normality while his wife's lover - an absurd man who also seems to try to seduce Mark - makes no bones about what he's offered the wife, but that as much as Mark wanted his ideal stay-at-home wife, Heinrich wants to possess Anna as well despite his hedonistic, free-love approach to things.

But, Anna retreats to an abandoned apartment near the Berlin wall in a sort of dead-zone (in fact, all of Berlin feels like an end-of-the-world dead-zone in this movie), where she is nurturing a creature.  Meanwhile, Mark has met a seeming clone of Anna, his son's teacher, who begins appearing, and fulfilling the motherly duties Anna so despised.  And, in the interim, Anna slips further from her humanity, her combined belief in faith and chance at odds and splitting her in two.

As I say, everyone takes a swipe at what it all means.  It is very much a movie riding on vibes, and for that, and the remarkable performances by Neill and (especially) Adjani, it's worth a watch.  If nothing else, it's a reminder that horror takes many forms, and some of those are close-by, personal and domestic - that the shattering of a marriage is it's own slow-motion horror.  

I won't write much more, but let's put a check-box next to this one as I'd been seeking it out, and was delighted it showed up on Criterion (still the best streamer out there, pound-for-pound).   Someday I may return to this one.  I can see it as a favorite of people who like a particular kind of horror or movie, and among that niche, it's genuinely very good.  And I waver on going back and forth between "your job as a film maker is to artfully communicate ideas in an impactful way, and this seems to whiz just past making a more impactful statement by being a smidge more clear about the writer/ director's intentions" and "nah, let it be what it is.  What a time for cinema that this sort of thing was made and got a release and is so gripping to watch".  I think I'll stick with the latter.