Sam Neill’s Sweaty, Emotional Turn In ‘Possession’ Made Me Reckon with My Own Depression

Art is personal. It’s personal for those who create it, and it’s personal to those who devour it. We can’t predict — nor can we control — what art does to us, what it pulls out of us, or the way it grabs you by the back of the head and slams your face to a mirror. This is partly why it’s sometimes impossible to separate a criticism from a personal attack. This phenomenon, the annexation of someone else’s work as a new and essential part of yourself, is the only reasoning I can come up with for how I felt when Shudder — a horror streaming service that I don’t even have an active subscription to — added Possession, the 1981 divorce film (what an understatement) from Andrzej Żuławski.

The film has been notorious in reputation since its release and has never been available to stream, nor even available to watch unless you shell out for a physical copy or track down a local theater with a print. Now it’s on a streaming service, and it feels a little like the darkest part of my brain is now available to watch for $5.99/month. Of course no one would know this unless I wrote about it, since I’m not divorced, nor do I live in Berlin, have a child, or work as a spy. What horrible part of this film do I see in myself, and why am I writing about it?

It’s all Sam Neill.

Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani play Mark and Anna, a couple going through the most chaotic conscious uncoupling ever caught on film. In fact, the first half of the film plays out like a harrowing relationship drama, one that captures the disorienting trauma of separation via dialogue stripped of context and nearly surrealist body language. Why is Mark nearly doing a 360° vertical turn in a rocking chair while berating Anna for neglecting their child? You need no explanation because somehow it makes emotional sense.

In every dissection of Possession, Adjani is pulled out as the film’s still-beating heart — justifiably. Her performance is unlike anything you’ve ever seen in film, and that’s true before the supernatural elements kick in nearly halfway through the picture. Her pain, mania, obsession, ecstasy, terror — it’s all dialed up to an 11 yet still alarmingly recognizable as human behavior. It’s unsettling.

And then there’s Sam Neill, whose portrayal of Mark doesn’t get the same spotlight but is every bit the 11 as Adjani’s. And it’s Neill’s turn as a man at the eye of a hurricane-level depressive spiral that hit me hard when I first watched Possession in October of 2020. After years of therapy and a lifetime of varying levels of anxiety and depression, I saw a performance that captured exactly how I feel when my brain is lost in a black hole of its own making.

Neill isn’t portraying the typical depression or break in mental health that we usually see on TV. Neill’s performance is not balanced with aw shucks charm like Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso. Mark has none of Don Draper’s closed-off commitment to feeling nothing. Ben Wyatt gets depressed and throws himself into stop-motion animation, but there’s nothing productive about Mark in Possession. Neill’s performance as Mark goes further than any other depiction of depression that I’ve ever seen on film or in television because it strips depression of everything — no resistance, no denial, no distraction — and leaves just the all-consuming fire.

The fire burns every time Mark questions Anna about the affair he knows she’s having, as he demands answers that will stoke his flame. Neill performs these scenes — a pair of rows in the ex-couple’s incredibly cramped kitchen where Anna always seems to be preparing raw meat — with his arms clenched, his neck stretched, his face red. He’s simmering and boiling over all at once.

There’s a sequence in a hotel where Mark holes up for three weeks, weeks depicted as violent convulsions on a sweat-drenched bed and him, bearded, careening down a hallway in a beat up suit and no shirt. He tries to talk on the phone but he can’t find the words, his voice, or even air.

If Mark has a parallel to Anna’s violent miscarriage scene, a blistering three-minute panic attack of Adjani screeching and twisting and howling in an empty subway station, it has to be the initial meetup in a cafe to discuss their separation. Mark and Anna are clearly at extreme odds, literally seated peculiarly perpendicular to each other, as Mark gnashes his teeth and rattles off his terms. The argument heightens when Mark says he won’t see their son again, refusing joint custody and playing “Sunday daddy.” And when Anna, furious, snaps and says that if she knew her lover existed years ago, then she never would’ve had a child with Mark, Mark explodes. This sends Mark into a rage, flipping table after table, chasing her, only to be stopped by the kind of pile-on that you see in a superhero movie. Mark’s depression has made him inhuman, a nearly unstoppable force of rage.

Neill plays all of it, the wallowing and the hysteria, like a symphony of self-destruction. And, making the performance even more commendable, Neill spends much of the first 20 minutes of Possession alone, a one-man wrecking crew destroying everything around him.

This is depression — at least how I felt and feel it (sidenote: reach out to someone if you too feel this way!). Depression is often depicted in media as a quiet, sullen experience. When depression holds me hostage, as it did when I watched Possession in October 2020, it feels like wanting to fight, scream, cry, convulse, and rage. But, having nowhere to safely or healthily direct that bomb blast, I swallow it. It’s all simmer and no boiling over.

Possession is not an aspirational movie. Possession is a depiction of our worst selves unleashed upon each other with all of their might. Watching an actor, specifically Sam Neill, exorcise all of these demons in a harrowing, emotionally exhausting tour de force performance — again, art affects us in bizarre ways, but seeing Mark dive headfirst into this hell feels cathartic. It feels cathartic in the same way that I imagine visiting a rage room or diving into a mosh pit must feel (and as a bonus, nothing gets broken and I don’t have to listen to Limp Bizkit).

It probably doesn’t need to be pointed out that Mark is not a role model. Mark is a cruel, abusive, petty man with incredibly compromised morals (he is a spy, which at times seems like a tacked-on plot point just to explain how Mark knows how to efficiently kill someone).

I connect more to this performance because it is Sam Neill cutting loose and giving into madness. It probably does need to be pointed out that Neill is an outspoken advocate for mental health and spent The Pandemic Year (2020) providing near daily words of encouragement and entertainment that I looked forward to every morning. He’s also a man whose work has had a profound affect on me, and he’s my favorite actor of all time (thanks, in part, to Possession). Taking all of that in while watching Possession for the first time — it’s a weird cocktail, but it works. It worked for me. Of course, upping dosages, seeing a therapist and psychiatrist, and gradually adding another prescription to the mix helped get me to where I am today. Again, don’t be like Mark. Be like Sam and talk to someone.

Thanks to the aforementioned regiment of therapy and medicine, I don’t boil over much anymore. I like to think that the hottest I get is a low simmer. I mean, life holds us over the burner, but at least the knob’s turned down a bit. I don’t know what it says about me that I get cathartic vibes from watching Sam Neill lose his damn mind on film, but I can’t help it: Possession is part of my mental health journey now.