POSSESSION: Scenes From A (Monstrous) Marriage

What better way to celebrate the reopening of the theater with the best repertory programming in New York than the 4K restoration of an unhinged horror classic? Metrograph is finally returning to in-person screenings after a lengthy pandemic-induced hiatus with a presentation of Andrzej Żuławski’s cult favorite, Possession, newly restored for its 40th anniversary. Żuławski channeled the pain of his divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek into the film, which is a portrait of a marriage that is not so much unraveling but rotting out from the inside. Featuring a legendary lead performance and a striking synth-heavy score that amplifies the film’s hysterical tone to the point that you may start to doubt your own sanity, Possession is a thrilling cinematic experience — the best kind to experience in a darkened theater, surrounded by strangers.

Marriage Story

Mark (Sam Neill) is an international spy returning home to West Berlin after yet another long absence. He’s told his bosses to find a replacement; he wants to quit his job and focus all of his energy on his family. However, before he can so much as ask her how she is doing, his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) announces that she wants a divorce. What follows are several sequences of violent marital strife in which Anna and Mark scream themselves hoarse and beat each other to a pulp. Eventually, Anna admits that she has been having an affair with an older, enigmatic German named Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) who speaks in New Age riddles and never seems to have buttoned his shirt in his life.

But Anna’s behavior surrounding their split is so strange — she leaves their young son, Bob, home alone for lengthy periods of time and attacks her own throat with an electric knife — that Mark decides to hire a private detective to follow her. (He also cuts himself with the electric knife; it quickly becomes apparent that none of the adults in this film should be allowed around sharp objects.) What is uncovered in the derelict Kreuzberg flat where Anna is living is a horror beyond human comprehension. In the meantime, Mark begins a tentative relationship with Bob’s teacher, Helen (also Adjani), who bears a striking visual resemblance to his wife. Yet where Anna is an angry whirlwind of emotion with a penchant for wearing dark dresses that match her deep blue eyes, Helen is a green-eyed vision in white—an angel who has appeared in place of the demon, a doppelgänger who asks nothing of him while Anna asks more than he knows how to give.

Monstrous Feminine

The first forty or so minutes of Possession are hard to get through, comprised as they are of seemingly endless scenes in which Anna shrieks and Mark shoves and at one point even punches her in the face; she flees into the street with bright red blood dribbling from her mouth, appearing more animal than human. When Anna first tells Mark she wants a divorce, his response is to trash the cafe where they have met and then to disappear on a three-week drinking binge, finally waking in a seedy motel. These scenes are difficult to watch (and to hear — did I mention the screaming?) and it is only when Anna finally departs for her mysterious hovel in Kreuzberg that things start to move beyond the standard breakup drama into something far more intriguing.

Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes for her performance in Possession; while the emotional and physical strain of her work in the film apparently took her years to recover from, the result is a character for the ages. A veritable storm of angst, terror, and desire, her Anna is one of cinema’s most striking depictions of madness. Ethereally beautiful in a way that feels not entirely of this world, Adjani is capable of twisting her lovely face into the most monstrous expressions; she can go from resembling a delicate damsel in distress like Snow White to the Wicked Stepmother out to destroy her in the blink of an eye. Her frantic ramblings about “Sister Faith” and “Sister Chance” are like catechisms, and the film’s most fantastically frightening scene—a violent miscarriage in an abandoned subway tunnel in which Adjani’s body twitches and contorts itself seemingly out of her control as she babbles and shrieks in agony — makes one feel as though one is bearing witness to an exorcism in real-time.

Neill too is put through the wringer in Possession, though his histrionics are harder to bear than Adjani’s. This is not the fault of Neill as an actor, but rather that of Mark as a character. As he obsessively stalks Anna’s every move and lashes out violently at others, one grows weary. Given the heightened atmosphere of the entire film, one can be a bit forgiving, but Mark’s emotional disintegration over Anna’s betrayal feels far too extreme regardless; if every secret agent during the Cold War had his instability, nuclear annihilation would have been inevitable. As a result, even when Anna is not on the screen, there is little respite for the audience from the onslaught of insanity. Nonetheless, when Neill directs his gaze at the camera — his clear blue eyes are as icy as Adjani’s — the chill that goes down one’s spine is quite remarkable.

The main cast is rounded out by Bennent’s oddly erotic Heinrich and Margit Carstensen’s blowsy neighbor, Margie; she and Mark share a mutual hatred for each other that appears on the verge of boiling over into sexual desire at any moment. None of these people feel entirely real, as though they would never exist outside of the weird world Żuławski has created for them to exist in. That’s fine, though, because what a world it is—one that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let you go. The film is shot in a cold, blue-grey palette courtesy of cinematographer Bruno Nuytten (who went on to direct his then-partner Adjani in the César Award-winning Camille Claudel) that renders the bloody violence all the more visually striking, while the frenetic synth score by Andrzej Korzyński is basically the epitome of 1980s horror composing. Combined, they help sustain an inescapably haunted feeling that pervades the entire film and makes the increasingly outrageous events of the plot feel strangely fitting.

Shortly before shooting Possession, Żuławski was forced to leave his native Poland after the country effectively banned his movies; his split from his country-influenced Possession just as much as his split from his wife did, and his choice of West Berlin as the film’s setting — the frontier of the Eastern Bloc, symbolically and physically cut off from the world by the Berlin Wall—reflects that pain. Żuławski’s West Berlin is so bleak and empty that one quickly stops being surprised that no one calls the cops on Anna and Mark’s near-apocalyptic arguments; the streets, cafes, and bars are all so sparsely populated that one periodically wonders if the film takes place in the distant future, as opposed to our recent past. Yet the Cold War lurks like a phantom in the background throughout Possession, with Mark’s mysterious employers attempting to get him to return to work, angry graffiti scribbled on the facade of the Berlin Wall, and an overriding sense of everyone being surveilled — it’s not just Anna who is being secretly watched. One can understand why Anna, left alone by her husband time and time again as he went out on assignment, would dissolve into madness at being abandoned in such a place, on the front lines of the end of the world.

Conclusion

Żuławski channeled his personal heartbreak into primal horror, and the result is a messy, marvelous movie. If you have not yet seen it, there’s no time like the present.

What do you think? Are you familiar with Possession? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The new 4K restoration of Possession will be released theatrically and digitally exclusively by Metrograph on October 1, 2021. It will expand across the U.S. on October 15, 2021.

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