Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Possession’ on Shudder, the 1981 Cult-Horror Masterpiece Featuring an All-Time Performance by Isabelle Adjani

Finally, finally, finally, Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult masterpiece Possession makes its streaming debut, thanks to the ever-loving sickos at Shudder. No hyperbole expressed in reaction to or description of it can match what the film itself offers – it’s one of the most notorious and deranged movies ever made, plumbed from the bleakest psychological depths of its maker and performers, including Isabelle Adjani and a pre-fame Sam Neill. It was banned (dubbed one of the UK’s “video nasties”), edited for easier consumption (40-plus minutes were chopped out for its U.S. release) and hailed at Cannes, which nominated it for the Palme d’Or and proclaimed Adjani best actress for a performance unlike any before or since. Possession is a movie that seeps into your bones and corrodes your soul and that’s why it must, must, must be seen, so you can never, never, never pry it from your memory.

POSSESSION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Anna (Adjani) is done. No longer in love. Ending it. Mark (Neill) returns to West Berlin from his most recent spy mission and he’s barely out of the cab and on the curb with his luggage when Anna tells him they’re through. The only question is why. They have a young son, Bob (Michael Hogben), apparently the product of an unsatisfying physical union for Anna. Mark does a little digging and learns she’s been keeping a lover named Heinrich for quite some time now. He asks her point blank if she’s been sleeping with Heinrich and if he’s a superior lover, and she answers point blank, yes, and yes. They argue in a cafe and he destroys it in a look-what-you-made-me-do kind of way and is tackled and subdued, piled on by waiters and chefs. He moves into a hotel and drinks and writhes and thrashes and sweats in bed for weeks. Nearby, the Berlin Wall looms. It cuts a city in half, and the streets of that city often seem so weirdly empty.

Now, these aren’t just fights between Anna and Mark. They’re roaring, operatic donnybrooks – slaps, fists, things said that can’t be unsaid, hollered and bellowed in bedeviled fits of cruelty. All he wants is for her to stay and all she wants is to leave and it’s all expressed in fits of unfettered animosity, as if there was nothing between their ids and the air. Mark returns to the apartment to find Bob smeared with food, having been left alone for far too long. Anna has been acting eccentric, disappearing for days. Her friend Margie (Margit Carstensen) helps take care of Bob, despite the fact that she and Mark are often at odds – “I loathe you, Margie,” he hisses. Mark meets the boy’s teacher, Helen, and is shocked to learn that she’s Anna’s doppelganger (also played by Adjani), albeit calm, warm, welcoming and with vibrant green eyes. He confronts Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), and Heinrich beats him bloody, a weirdly erudite alpha defeating the hapless beta with a flurry of bizarre maneuvers blending martial arts, dance and yoga.

Thing is, neither Heinrich nor Mark knows where Anna is. She’ll turn up at the apartment to hug Bob and grind some meat and cut it up with an electric carving knife which she puts to her own neck and which Mark uses to slice his wrist thrice – as you do when you’re in the throes of marital despair – and then she’ll disappear again. So he hires a detective and tracks her to an apartment where the inconceivable has been occurring. No, really, it’s inconceivable. You might expect something gruesome and awful, but not this. It’s so f—ed, it transcends metaphor. It’s the raw fodder of nightmares – the raw fodder of nightmares that makes gross squelching noises as it writhes in a pool of its own visceral oozing slop. At this point, it’s not entirely clear whether Mark still wants Anna back, but if it were me, I’d call a divorce lawyer and start divvying up the books and kitchenware.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Eraserhead, A Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos and other amazingly disreputable midnight films that leave you scarred.

Performance Worth Watching: Adjani is at once lovely and terrifying as a woman acting out her every irrational urge. She’s so good, she all but levitates through the film, seemingly summoning the darkest fodder of her subconscious for the camera. Possession’s notoriety stems from The Sex Scene, which is an act of on-screen bravery. But her most vulnerable moment is a sequence in which Anna suffers a psychotic breakdown on a subway platform, foaming and thrashing as if bewitched by a demon, suffering a miscarriage as a variety of gruesome liquid substances emerge from various orifices. Adjani appears to have lost control of herself while Zulawski filmed. It’s an all-time moment among an all-time performance.

Memorable Dialogue: Anna: “He’s very tired. He made love to me all night.”

Sex and Skin: Yes. You don’t want to know. But yes, indeed, affirmative. You probably will not be aroused.

Our Take: With Possession, Zulawski boils the bitterness of a broken marriage down to primordial rage. The filmmaker was enduring an ugly divorce when he conceived the film, and had been recently forced from his home in Communist Poland due to the challenging content of his work – and so he channels his emotional and physical exile into this psychotic story about sex, politics, religion and our ideal selves, and of course the core idea in the title: Can one be possessed by another, specifically, one’s lover? By one’s country? By a supernatural force, be it god or devil?

The only way to describe the performances here is “post-histrionic.” Adjani and Neill don’t try to reach the back row – they obliterate it. Their work makes Kramer vs. Kramer look like My Dinner with Andre. Mark and Anna verbally eviscerate each other with heartless savagery in a display of berserk overacting that achieves near-abstraction through performance art, and Adjani and Neill were reportedly emotionally exhausted by the time filming concluded – and we as viewers can sense that extremity of emotion, as the performances threaten to leap from the screen to terrify us in the comfort of our homes. Zulawski’s encouragement of such hysteria is of a mind with Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, in which the cast members performed while under hypnosis; such exaggeration of human behavior in either direction reflects both purity of expression and the spirit of provocation.

And then there’s the creature. I fear describing it will not only ruin it for viewers who have yet to see this Grand Guignol treasure of a film, but also won’t do it justice. I will say it has tentacles and something resembling a face, and leave it at that. It’s a creation of special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi, who sandwiched Possession between his Oscar-winning work designing space aliens in Alien and E.T.. It appears to be a manifestation of Anna’s cardinal desires; it’s hallucinatory and beyond vile; it’s a work of art; I love it, just love it.

Possession’s bewildering complexities and unnerving overtures render it a singular work, crazier even than Lynch and Cronenberg; it’s the only of Zulawski’s films to achieve cross-cultural fame (perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also his only English-language film), and feels like a life’s work, with all of his fears and agonies hardened and condensed into a two-hour nightmare-logic psychodrama. The line between affection and disgust has never been so thin.

Our Call: Masterpiece. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.