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MovieMail's Review
Possession portrays a couple’s collapsing marriage with the ferocity of a splatter movie. Julian Upton is shocked by the film that scored at Cannes but was banned in the UK.
While the French were giving out prizes for Possession (Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes), the British were busy banning it (via the DPP’s ‘video nasty’ list). Such bipolar reactions illustrate just how the film is open to interpretation.
Ostensibly a horror story, it portrays a couple’s collapsing marriage with the ferocity of a splatter movie. Mark (Sam Neill, adventurously cast) suspects Anna (Adjani) is having an affair. He is proved right when he finds her having sex with a tentacled beast in a squalid apartment. What’s more, the union has produced an unholy offspring, growing in the corner. (You can kind of see where the DPP was coming from).
Cannes likes to reward actresses going bonkers on screen, and Adjani’s howling, primal performance, complete with unannounced vomiting, doesn’t disappoint — she makes the girl from The Exorcist just look overtired. The Berlin Wall setting points sharply to a political subtext, but this is as much a visceral expression of the horror of divorce as it is a comment on the brutality of state oppression. Quite an eye opener.
A horror film truly like no other - imagine a daytime soap written by David Cronenberg and directed by the Brothers Quay - Possession is an intense, shocking experience that was banned in the UK as a 'video nasty'. With its dark subject matter and high gore quotient, it's not for the faint hearted.
With their marriage in pieces Anna and Mark's tense relationship has become a psychotic descent into screaming matches, violence and self-mutilation. Believing his wife's only lover is the sinister Heinrich, Mark is unaware of the demonic, tentacled creature that Anna has hidden away for liaisons in a deserted apartment and will stop at nothing to protect.
Written and directed by Andrzej Zulawski, Possession is a deeply unsettling experience, aided by the horrific special effects of the great Carlo Rambaldi (Deep Red, Close Encounters, Alien). The film, though banned on video, was nominated for a BAFTA and the Palme d'Or and Adjani's astonishing performance earned her Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the French Cesars.
