Possession

Possession
original film poster
Directed by	Andrze Żuławski
Produced by	Marie-Laure Reyre
Written by	Frederic Tuten Andrzej Żuławski
Starring	Isabelle Adjani Sam Neill
Music by	Andrzej Korzynski
Cinematography	Bruno Nuytten
Editing by	Marie-Sophi Dubus Suzanne Lang-Willar
Release date(s)	May 27, 1981
Running time	97 minutes (edited version) 123 minutes (original cut)
Country	France West Germany
Language	English
Box office	$1,113,538[1]

Possession is a 1981 French cult horror film directed by Andrzej Żuławski and starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.

Plot

Mark (Sam Neill) returns home from an espionage mission (the nature of this mission is vague, but it involves long trips abroad, cash stuffed into briefcases, and vials of secret liquids) to find that his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), wants a divorce. She won't say why, but insists it's not because she's found someone else.

Though Mark would rather stay with Anna and work things out, he turns both the apartment and custody of their young son, Bob, over to her. Living alone, he begins to obsess over her, making dozens of calls, and seemingly going mad. He pays a visit to their flat only to find Bob alone, unkempt, and neglected. When Anna returns, he refuses to leave her alone with the child but attempts to make amends. He stays at the apartment to care for Bob but Anna leaves in the middle of the night.

Mark receives a phone call from Anna’s lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), telling him that Anna is with him. He then gets Heinrich’s phone number from Anna’s friend, Margie. The next day, Mark meets Bob’s teacher, Helen, also played by Ms. Adjani. She looks exactly like Anna but with brilliant green eyes and where Anna is hysterical, Helen is calm and kind.

Mark pays a visit to Heinrich who swears he didn’t call, telling Mark that Anna needed space; he has not seen her, having been away on a business trip himself. Mark attacks Heinrich, who defends himself and leaves Mark bloodied.

Mark returns home to find Anna who, when confronted, is vague on her whereabouts. He beats her and she storms out. He follows, apologizing, attempting a reconciliation. She leaves him on the street. On his way back to the flat, he encounters Margie, whose left leg is inexplicably in a cast, and he tells her, “I loathe you” when she offers to look after Bob. Mark meets with a private investigator whom he hires to follow Anna, then returns to the flat where he and Margie embrace in the bedroom.

The next day, Mark and Anna have another extreme argument during which she cuts her own neck with an electric knife. Mark tends the wound and then sits, forlornly in the kitchen, cutting his own arm with the knife. She leaves again – going off to her mysterious place, her neck bandaged.

Following Anna around the city, the private investigator discovers Anna in a squalid, nearly empty apartment. The investigator pretends to be a building manager and inspects the apartment. In the bathroom, he finds a creature of such bizarre proportions that he is stunned into silence. Anna kills him with the end of a broken bottle.

Meanwhile, Mark begins a relationship with Helen. When she stays the night, Bob is awakened by nightmares, crying out for his mother. Helen apologizes and leaves saying she should not have attempted to replace Anna.

Zimmerman, the lover of the missing private detective, approaches Mark to inquire about his whereabouts. Mark gives him the address of Anna’s mysterious apartment, which was presumably given to him by the detective. When Zimmerman goes to Anna’s apartment, he discovers the freakish creature as well as his dead lover’s body. Anna proclaims that the creature, “Is very tired. He made love to me all night,” and “He’s still unfinished, you know.” And then violently beats Zimmerman when he attempts to shoot her.

Anna, returning to the flat she shares with Mark, continues her erratic behavior, putting clothes in the refrigerator and food in the bedroom. She then tells Mark about her miscarriage. In a flashback, Anna, on her way home from market, has what appears to be a seizure of epic violence as she walks through the subway, ending with her on the floor of the passageway, oozing blood and fluids from every orifice. She tells Mark, “What I miscarried there was sister faith and what was left was sister chance.”

She leaves him again and Mark calls Heinrich, giving him Anna’s address. Heinrich attempts to make love to her but finds the creature, still monstrous but more developed, in her bedroom. Anna then reveals the grim fruits of her endeavors: a collection of body parts in her refrigerator, presumably those of the dead detective and Zimmerman. She attacks Heinrich with a knife and he flees, bleeding. Anna, meanwhile, prepares to make love to the creature.

Heinrich telephones Mark and asks to meet him at a bar, telling him what he has seen. Mark goes to the apartment and discovers the remains of the detective and his lover; he destroys the apartment by igniting the gas stove and blowing it up. When Mark arrives at the bar he murders Heinrich in the bathroom, making it look as if he drowned in his own vomit.

Upon returning to the flat, Mark finds Margie outside with her throat cut, possibly at Anna’s hand. He brings the body back into the flat where Anna waits. She greets him tenderly, cleans him up and makes love to him in the kitchen. He lays out a plan for them to cover up the problem and, as Bob awakens to find them together, she flees.

Heinrich’s mother phones Mark looking for her son. She tells Mark that Heinrich’s body was discovered but that she did not identify it because it was only his body, “his soul was not there.”

Mark, who has continued to cover for Anna, finds her at the apartment where the creature, considerably more evolved, copulates with her on the bed. As the creature penetrates her she repeats over and over, “Almost.”

Mark meets Heinrich’s mother in person and she claims that she “must be with him.” She then seemingly poisons herself and dies. Mark, later wandering the street, meets up with his former business associates who insist that he do business with them again. Mark appears to refuse and later, while being followed by police, murders an officer then flees on a motorcycle. 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, “I wanted to find you. It is finished now,” and reveals the creature, now fully formed as Mark’s doppelganger. Mark raises his gun to shoot it but he and Anna are gunned down by a hail of bullets from below. The doppelganger remains impervious.

Anna uses Mark’s gun to shoot herself and dies in his arms. He jumps to his death through the stairwell. The doppelganger, meanwhile, enlists the help of a woman who resembles Margie, standing at the top of the stairs. The doppelganger flees through the roof.

Later, Helen is at the flat with Bob when the doorbell rings. Bob repeats over and over, “Don’t open,” but Helen ignores his plea. She goes to the door as the sounds of sirens, planes and explosions fill the air. Bob races through the flat, ending in the bathroom where he jumps face down into a bathtub full of water and floats as if dead. Meanwhile, Helen, listening to the sirens and planes as if in fear, seems unaware of the doppelganger which can be seen through the glass door. Her expression changes to something indeterminate as light from the explosions illuminate her brilliant, green eyes.

Cast

• Isabelle Adjani as Anna / Helen
• Sam Neill as Mark
• Margit Carstensen as Margit Gluckmeister, called Margie or sometimes Marge
• 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

Background

It was filmed in Berlin, West Germany. The director has stated that he wrote the screenplay in the midst of a messy divorce.

Special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi assisted in creating the tentacle creature featured in the film.

Viewers have found it difficult to properly classify it as drama, horror, or suspense, though elements of all three are present in the movie.^[2] Some reviewers have interpreted Possession as an intense drama focusing on the effects of marital problems and stress upon children.

Reception

Box office and distribution

The film had a modest total of 541,120 admissions in France.^[3]

The film was also very controversial when first released, and heavily edited for distribution in the United States. After an initial limited theatre release in the United Kingdom, Possession was banned as one of the notorious Video Nasties, although released uncut on DVD in 1999. It gradually developed a minor cult following among arthouse aficionados.

Critical

Possession currently holds a 77% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Possession is a veritable carnival of nose bleeds. Because the three leading characters - Anna, her husband, Marc (Sam Neill), and her lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) - all knock each other violently around, they play most of their scenes in one state of bloodiness or another. 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.^[4]

Michael Brooke of Sight & Sound commented, "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."^[5]

Variety said, "Possession starts on a hysterical note, stays there and surpasses it as the film progresses. There are excesses on all fronts: in supposedly ordinary married life and then occult happenings, intricate political skulduggery with the infamous Berlin Wall as background - they all abound in this horror-cum-political-cum - psychological tale."^[6]

Awards

In 1981, Isabelle Adjani won the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Possession and Quartet. Adjani also won the year's César Award for Best Actress for her performance in Possession.

References

External links

• Possession at the Internet Movie Database
• Possession at AllRovi
• Possession at Rotten Tomatoes
• Possession review at The Film Walrus
• Review at SpinningImage UK reviewer
• Review at Soiled Sinema