Andrzej Żuławski’s POSSESSION is a strange hybrid film wherein the way it avoids clear categorization is part of its charm. In the beginning, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) tells her husband, spy Mark (Sam Neill), that she wants a divorce because she has a new lover. After Mark recovers from his shock, he confronts her new beau, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), a spiritually detached intellectual, only to find out from him that Anna is committed to another lover with her body and soul. Who or what the lover is, Heinrich doesn’t know, but the answer grows on the wall.

POSSESSION is a divorce drama, a horror film, a meditation on the self, hope, and faith, at times a satire and ultimately a mirror image of divided Berlin. There are doublings everywhere. The dialogue and interactions are tense and wound up from the first moment on, and when the calm seemingly returns, the impression that something isn’t right in this reality remains. The end of the world is in sight, filmed with a view of the border in Wedding and Kreuzberg, the normal rules apply here less and less until something apocalyptic breaks out of Anna in the subway tunnel in an often copied scene. In England, the film was on the “Video Nasties“ list along with films about cannibals and chainsaws, but what is most memorable about POSSESSION aren’t the effects by Carlo Rambaldi (ALIEN), but the way in which the film shows the attitude to life in Berlin at the height of the Cold War, where nothing was safe and every second, just around the corner, a Nuclear War could break out.

Christian Klose (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy