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Possession
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Andrzej Żuławski
Written by	Frederic Tuten Andrzej Żuławski
Produced by	Marie-Laure Reyre
Starring	Isabelle Adjani Sam Neill
Cinematography	Bruno Nuytten
Edited by	Marie-Sophi Dubus Suzanne Lang-Willar
Music by	Andrzej Korzyński
Distributed by	Gaumont
Release date	27 May 1981 (1981-05-27) (Cannes)
Running time	124 minutes (original cut)
Countries	France West Germany
Language	English

Possession is a 1981 psychological horror drama film directed by Andrzej Żuławski, written by Żuławski and Frederic Tuten, and starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. The plot obliquely follows the relationship between an international spy and his wife, who begins exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking him for a divorce.

Possession, an international co-production between France and West Germany, was filmed in West Berlin in 1980. Żuławski's only English-language film, it premiered at the 34th Cannes Film Festival, where Adjani won the Best Actress award for her performance. The screenplay was written during the painful divorce of Żuławski with actress Malgorzata Braunek. The film was not a commercial success either in Europe or in the United States, where it was released with an edited version, but eventually acquired cult status.

Plot

Mark is a spy who returns home to West Berlin from a mysterious espionage mission to find that his wife, Anna, wants a divorce. She won't say why but insists it's not because she found someone else. Mark reluctantly turns the apartment and custody of their young son, Bob, over to her. After recovering from a destructive drinking spree, he visits the apartment to find Bob alone, unkempt, and neglected. When Anna returns, he stays with Bob, refusing to leave her alone with the child but attempts to make amends. Anna leaves in the middle of the night.

Mark receives a phone call from Anna's lover, Heinrich, telling him that Anna is with him. The next day, Mark meets Bob's teacher, Helen; she inexplicably looks identical to Anna but with green eyes. Mark visits and fights Heinrich, then beats Anna at home, after which she flees. The next morning, they have another argument during which they both cut themselves with an electric knife.

A private investigator hired by Mark follows Anna and discovers she has a second flat in a derelict apartment building. He finds a bizarre creature in the bedroom and Anna kills him with a broken bottle. Zimmerman, the lover of the now-dead detective, goes to the flat himself, where he finds the creature and his lover's body. Anna beats Zimmerman in a rage before stealing his gun and shooting him to death.

Anna continues her erratic behavior and recounts to Mark a violent miscarriage she suffered in the subway while he was gone. She claims it resulted in a nervous breakdown; during the miscarriage, she oozed blood and fluids from her orifices and ominously tells him she "miscarried Sister Faith, and what left was Sister Chance." Heinrich visits Anna and discovers the creature as well as a collection of dismembered body parts in her refrigerator. She attacks him, and Heinrich flees, bleeding.

Heinrich calls Mark and begs him to pick him up. Mark stops by Anna's apartment first and discovers the body parts; the creature, however, is gone. Mark meets Heinrich at the bar where he is, murders him, and stages it as an accidental death. He then lights Anna's apartment on fire before fleeing on Heinrich's motorcycle. At home, he finds her friend Margie's corpse outside. He drags the body inside where Anna greets him, and the two have sex in the kitchen. Afterward, he makes plans to cover up Margie's death. He then discovers Anna having sex with the creature, and she utters "Almost." Heinrich's mother phones Mark asking about her son. When he goes to meet with her, she commits suicide by poisoning herself.

The next day, as Mark wanders the street, he meets up with his former business associates. He is evasive and returns to Margie's apartment to find it surrounded by police and his former employers. He stages a distraction, allowing someone, possibly Anna, to sneak away in his car, but he is wounded in the ensuing shootout. Fleeing, he has a horrific accident and races into a building where he is pursued by Anna, the police, and his business associates. Anna tells him, "It is finished now," and reveals the creature, now fully formed as Mark's doppelgänger. Mark raises his gun to shoot it but he and Anna are gunned down by a hail of bullets from the police below. Bloodied and dying, Anna lies atop Mark and uses his gun to shoot herself. She dies in his arms and he jumps to his death through the stairwell. The doppelgänger flees through the roof.

Later, Helen is at the flat babysitting Bob when the doorbell rings. Bob implores her not to open the door, but Helen ignores him. From outside, the sound of sirens, planes, and explosions fill the air. Bob races through the flat into the bathroom, where he floats in the bathtub face-down as though dead. The silhouette of the doppelgänger is seen from the frosted glass door. Helen stares, her brilliant green eyes illuminating.

Cast

• Isabelle Adjani as Anna / Helen
• Sam Neill as Mark
• Margit Carstensen as Margit Gluckmeister
• Heinz Bennent as Heinrich
• Johanna Hofer as Heinrich's mother
• Carl Duering as Detective
• Shaun Lawton as Zimmermann
• Michael Hogben as Bob
• Maximilian Rüthlein as Man with pink socks (as Maximilian Ruethlein)
• Thomas Frey as Pink socks' acolyte
• Leslie Malton as Sara, woman with club foot
• Gerd Neubert as Subway drunk

Themes

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (February 2020)

Numerous film critics have noted the theme of separation and marital disintegration as core themes in Possession. Scholar Bartłomiej Paszylk notes that the metaphors present in the film also represent "a disintegrating country. The very fact that the film takes place in Cold War-era West Berlin is quite significant for the metaphor of divorce—the wall that separates it from East Berlin being a symbol of disconnection of what was once united—but Zulawski's additional intention might have been for the Berlin wall to symbolize the Iron Curtain, and for Germany to symbolize Poland, a country he had to leave in order to keep making movies."

Production

The director Żuławski worked on the script for the film while in a state of deep depression. In 1976, he divorced the actress Malgorzata Braunek. Żuławski recalled how he once returned home late in the evening and found his five-year-old son Xavier alone in the apartment, smeared with jam, after his wife left him alone for several hours – this scene was directly reflected in Possession. A year and a half later, following the authorities' halting of work on the film On the Silver Globe in 1978, the director faced a de facto ban and was forced to leave Poland. While emigrating, he did not give up on suicidal thoughts, which he had initially been able to get rid of by starting to work on a new film.

Żuławski and the film's producer, Marie-Laure Reyre, immediately chose Isabelle Adjani as Anna. By this time, Adjani had already become a celebrity, but the producers had reasons to expect that she would accept the offer. After an unsuccessful attempt to start a career in Hollywood (released in 1978, Walter Hill's The Driver failed at the box office), Adjani decided to return to European cinema. She starred in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), but it had not yet been possible to repeat her success in being nominated for the Academy Award for her role in The Story of Adele H. (1975). However, Adjani's management company turned down the offer, and the filmmakers chose the next candidate Judy Davis, whose work in the film My Brilliant Career (1979) impressed Żuławski. Sam Neill, a less well-known actor and a fellow actor of Davis in the same film, was chosen for the role of Mark. Davis took a long break, and Adjani eventually accepted the offer.

The role was emotionally exhausting for Adjani. In one of the interviews, she stated that it took her several years to recover from, which J. Hoberman called "a veritable aria of hysteria". It was rumored that she attempted suicide after filming completed, which was confirmed by Żuławski. Time Out magazine compared the behavior of her character to the actions of "a dervish of unrestrained emotion and pure sexual terror".

There were two takes. This scene was filmed at five in the morning, when the subway was closed. I knew it was worth a lot of effort for , both emotionally and physically, because it was cold there. It was unthinkable to repeat this scene endlessly. Most of what's left on the screen is the first take. The second take was made as a safety net, as is customary when shooting difficult scenes, for example, in case the laboratory spoils the material.

— Żuławski on the filming of the famous scene with Anna's seizure in the subway passage

The director chose Berlin as the setting for the story because of its proximity to the Communist world, and shot most of the film next to the Wall, in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin in 1980. The "surreal, clean quality" Żuławski wanted for the film was aided by the Steadicam work of camera operator Andrzej Jaroszewicz and Bruno Nuytten's lighting. Carlo Rambaldi, the famous Italian special effects artist and the creator of the Alien animatronic head, assisted in creating the tentacle creature featured in the film.

Release

After an initial limited theatre release in the United Kingdom, the film was banned as one of the notorious "video nasties". On American screens, it came out in a heavily-edited 81-minute cut version on the eve of Halloween 1983, having lost more than a third of its runtime; the distributor turned Possession into an eccentric body horror, almost completely eliminating the main theme of the painful breakdown of marriage. This option was ridiculed by the American press as an example of "a cheap Grand Guignol" and had no public success.

Box office

Possession had a modest total of 541,120 admissions in France. In the United States, it was released on October 28, 1983 and grossed $1.1 million at the box office.

Home media

Although the film was banned from distribution in the United Kingdom, it was later released uncut on VHS and DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay Entertainment. In 2014, Mondo Vision released a region-free Blu-ray of the film featuring the uncut version. This release was available in a standard special edition, as well as a limited edition numbered to 2,000 units.

Reception

Critical response

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (February 2020)

"At times, the living-color Possession recalls Roman Polanski's black-and-white Repulsion, though only because Miss Adjani is required to slice up as many male victims as Catherine Deneuve did in the earlier, far better film."

Possession received negative reviews upon its initial release, with some criticizing the film's performances, and graphic content. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian stated that, while Żuławski displayed talent and the special effects were unforgettable, the film itself was far too serious for its own good. Dennis Schwartz from Ozus' World Movie Reviews rated the film a grade C+, calling it " Uncompromising demented cult oddity." Leonard Maltin wrote of the film: "Adjani "creates" a monster, to the consternation of husband Neill, lover Bennent—and the viewer," ultimately deeming the film a "confusing drama of murder, horror, intrigue, though it's all attractively directed."

Variety gave the film a positive review, praising Żuławski's direction, symbolism, and pacing, writing "mass of symbols and unbridled, brilliant directing meld this disparate tale into a film that could get cult following on its many levels of symbolism and exploitation."

Harry Haun of the New York Daily News alternately panned the film, awarding it one-and-a-half out of four stars and writing that Adjani's "prize-winning mad-act is impossible to appraise because the film it's in is outlandishly unhinged as well... Just about any dialogue accompanying this mess would seem ludicrous." The Philadelphia Daily News's Joe Baltake deemed the film a "boringly camp-elegante attempt by a group of reputable French, German and Polish filmmakers," and assessed Adjani's performance as "babbling, incoherent yet arresting." In his review, however, Baltake conceded that the truncated version of the film he had seen—cut by approximately 50 minutes—may have contributed to the film's incoherency.

Viewers have found it difficult to properly classify it as drama, horror, or suspense, though elements of all three are present in the movie.

Legacy

In the years following its release, Possession accrued a cult following. Film scholar Bartłomiej Paszylk deemed it "one of the most enigmatic and uncompromising horror movies in the history of cinema." Writer Kim Newman considers Possession to be a "kitsch film," noting: "Zulawski takes his film too seriously, but it's fun all the same... goes mad with his swooping camera, has everything in shot painted in blue and encourages his stars to attack their roles with a kind of stylised hysteria rare outside Japanese theatre." Newman also likened elements of Adjani's character to that of Samantha Eggar in The Brood (1979).

Michael Brooke of Sight & Sound commented in 2011, "Although it's easy to see why it was pigeonholed as a horror film, its first half presents what is still one of the most viscerally vivid portraits of a disintegrating relationship yet committed to film, comfortably rivalling Lars von Trier's Antichrist, David Cronenberg's The Brood and Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage." Reviewing the Blu-ray release of the movie in 2013, Michael Dodd of Bring The Noise was similarly impressed with what he called "an intense exploration of marital breakdown". He argued that this made Possession "one of the few horror films that successfully builds a back story for its main characters".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Possession holds an approval rating of 85% based on 2019 reviews, and an average rating of 7.69/10. Its consensus reads, "Blending genres as effectively as it subverts expectations, Possession uses powerful acting and disquieting imagery to grapple with complex themes."

References

1. ^ Chris Fujiwara. "Possession (1981)". Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved 16 June 2017.
2. Mazierska, Goddard 2014, p. 245. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMazierska,_Goddard2014 (help)
3. Wilkins, Budd (29 November 2011). "Possession: Film Review". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 10 June 2014.
4. ^ Paszylk 2009, p. 163.
5. Żuławski, Kim 2011. sfn error: no target: CITEREFŻuławski,_Kim2011 (help)
6. Adrian Szczypiński (2006). "Na srebrnym globie. Epilog" [On the silver globe. Epilogue.]. film.org (in Polish). Archived from the original on 5 January 2016. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
7. ^ Pyzik 2014. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPyzik2014 (help)
8. ^ J. Hoberman (30 November 2011). "Extreme Sex Addiction in Shame; Extreme Everything in Possession". Village Voice. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
9. Sen, Mayukh (27 June 2016). "Some Ways of Looking at Isabelle Adjani". Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 29 July 2016.
10. Canal+; Jakub Skoczeń (26 July 2018). Andrzej Żuławski on working with Isabelle Adjani in "Possession" (1981). YouTube. Artur Wilson. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
11. Tom Huddleston. "Possession Review". Time Out. Retrieved 15 June 2017.
12. Volchek, Dmitry. "Интервью Анджея Жулавского для Радио Свобода" [Andrzej Zulawski's interview for Radio Liberty]. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
13. https://www.rogerebert.com/far-flung-correspondents/no-exorcist-can-handle-possession
14. Freer, Ian (12 August 2012). "The Genius of Carlo Rambdali". Empire. Retrieved 12 March 2016.
15. Cite error: The named reference bfi was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
16. ^ Maltin 1994, p. 1022.
17. Taylor, Rumsey (23 May 2006). "Possession". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 16 June 2017.
18. "Possession". JP's Box-Office. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
19. "Possession (1983)". The Numbers. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
20. "Possession VHS". Amazon. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
21. "Possession DVD". Amazon. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
22. ^ Vijn, Ard (7 July 2014). "Blu-ray Review: The POSSESSION Release By Mondo Vision Owns All Others". Screen Anarchy. Archived from the original on 9 August 2019. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
23. Canby, Vincent (28 October 1983). "Film: 'Possession,' Blood And Horror, With Isabelle Adjani - The New York Times". NYTimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
24. Malcom, Derek (24 June 1982). "No Sex Please... Derek Malcom reviews a film that attacks pornography, and other new releases". Newspapers.com. The Guardian. p. 11. Retrieved 5 February 2020 – via Newspapers.com {subscription required.}
25. Schwartz, Dennis. "Possession – Dennis Schwartz Reviews". DennisSchwartzReviews.com. Ozus World Movie Reviews. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
26. "Variety Reviews - Possession - Film Reviews - - Review by Variety Staff". Variety.com. Variety Magazine. 13 October 1983. Archived from the original on 8 November 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
27. Haun, Harry (28 October 1983). "'Possession': repulsion". New York Daily News. New York City, New York. p. 5 – via Newspapers.com.
28. ^ Baltake, Joe (14 November 1983). "'Possession' an Exorcise in Futility". Philadelphia Daily News. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. p. 39 – via Newspapers.com.
29. (2 December 2011). "Film Review: Possession". Film Journal International. Retrieved 19 March 2018. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
30. ^ Newman 2011, p. 190.
31. Brooke, Michael. "Possession". Sight & Sound. Archived from the original on 14 May 2011. Retrieved 23 April 2011.
32. Dodd, Michael. "FILM REVIEW: Possession". Bring the Noise UK. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
33. "Possession (The Night the Screaming Stops) (1983)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 2 October 2019.

Sources

• Maltin, Leonard (1994). Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide. Plume. ISBN 978-0-452-27327-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Newman, Kim (2011). Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s (Revised ed.). A&C Black. ISBN 978-1-408-80503-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Paszylk, Bartłomiej (2009). The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-786-45327-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Possession at IMDb
• Possession at Rotten Tomatoes
• Possession at Box Office Mojo
• Template:Amg movie

• Use dmy dates from October 2012
• 1981 films
• 1981 horror films
• 1980s psychological drama films
• French supernatural horror films
• French drama films
• French films
• German supernatural horror films
• German drama films
• West German films
• English-language films
• 1980s supernatural horror films
• Films directed by Andrzej Żuławski
• Films set in Berlin
• Films featuring a Best Actress César Award-winning performance
• English-language French films
• Video nasties
• 1981 drama films