Revisiting ‘Possession’ For My First Wedding Anniversary
Anthony Gramuglia
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The first time I saw Andrez Zulawski’s Possession, I was in college. Now, I’m married. Watching this movie after a decade, now seated next to my spouse and not alone in a college dorm, crouched over a laptop with a 64-gigabyte hard drive, was an entirely new experience, one augmented entirely by life experience.
One of the great things about movies people don’t always talk about is how the act of movie-watching changes as you age. Your tastes obviously shift, but so does your emotional attachment to a subject matter, based entirely on life experience. When you’re in college, you understand marriage as a concept, but you see it in terms a college kid gets. Dating and romance. You don’t think of it as a commitment, nor do you think of all the intense emotion that builds to the marriage itself.
So yes, there are several horror movies about dating that resonate now as well as when I was younger. Takashi Miike’s Audition comes to mind immediately. That film hits hard no matter what age you are because everyone either had a nightmare dating story or knows someone with a nightmare dating story – among the other, existential horrors explored in Miike’s masterpiece.
But films about a marriage dissolving? Films where someone you trust betrays you? Stories where people fill the existential emptiness in their lives with sexual exploration? Venturing into territory unknown? Yes, Possession is a film that takes marriage, ravages it, and externalizes the pain felt by a relationship of that magnitude breaking down.
“Through a Disease, We Can Reach God”
I feel in hindsight it’s pretty clear I didn’t really get Possession in college, because I would pitch it to friends as “A Live-Action Legend of the Overfiend.”
Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend is an infamous 80s anime OVA that popularized tentacle erotica as a genre. It’s also a story about the end of the world, where sex becomes the vehicle through which reality is obliterated. Half my friends were anime fans at the time, so the reference would be something they’d get.
If they didn’t know anime, I told them it was one of the infamous Video Nasties—a collection of films banned from the United Kingdom during the 80s for explicit content. Among the collection was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust, and I Spit on Your Grave. Though, strangely enough, not Pier Pasolini’s Salo.
What stood out to me at the time was the overt outrageousness of Possession. My read of the film at the time was that the director Zulawski used tentacles and apocalyptic imagery in order to communicate the pain Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neil’s characters felt throughout the film. And that’s a read of the film I still agree with.
All of the characters in the film behave in an exaggerated, heightened way. We are conditioned by film criticism to appreciate subtle acting. The exaggerated acting throughout Possession runs counter to that.
Sam Neil’s Mark, upon realizing his wife Anna is cheating on him, throws furniture across a fancy restaurant before entering into a state of catatonia for three weeks. Heinrich, Anna’s lover, spends every scene rolling around the walls like a feline, looking ready to mate with everything in reach.
All of it, if you aren’t emotionally invested—or, rather, don’t understand the emotions at play—can feel a little ridiculous. And I admit, when I was younger, this component put me off a bit from the film. I just couldn’t engage with that part of the story.
But I could engage with the intrigue surrounding Anna’s tentacled lover, about the series of murders Anna commits to protect her lover from private investigators. And I especially connected with Anna’s brand of madness.
Isabelle Adjani’s performance in this film, even at a young age, blew me away. She starts the movie very withdrawn, being almost stiff as a board throughout. This, in contrast with the overacting around her, puts her in the center of our focus. We’re just waiting for her to do something bizarre. And…at first, it’s small. Carving her arm with a bread cutter. Weird smiles after being struck.
And everything is building to her massive eruption in the subway tunnel. If you have seen any singular scene from Possession, it is probably this, where Anna starts thrashing and screaming in the tunnel, smashing groceries against the wall before blood and bile ooze out of her orifices. Her acting is so hypnotizing and horrific that what is happening—her miscarriage, possibly with the alien—feels secondary.
At the time, I didn’t connect with the emotions coursing through every scene. But I could connect with the apocalypse and murders. Therefore, when the film ends with Berlin seemingly being obliterated and Sam Neil’s doppelganger pressed up against a glass door, it felt natural to me. It didn’t feel particularly horrific, so much as…the right spot for it to be.
In 1978, before filming Possession, director Zulawski was hard at work on the underrated sci-fi film On the Silver Globe. However, he was forced to leave Poland by the Polish ministry of culture. The film would not be completed until 1986. It’s hard to watch Possession, a film that starts with Sam Neil’s Mark returning home after a trip abroad only to find, upon arrival, that he is being rejected by those he cares about, and not think of Zulawski’s very real expulsion from his home, knowing this context.
“For the First Time, You Look Vulgar to Me.”
Now, for context, I am incredibly happy to be married and I love my spouse. Few things make me as happy as cooking a nice meal, sitting down on the couch, and watching horror movies with the person I love more than any other. Some of our first dates involved horror movies. From Paranormal Activity and the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street to Hereditary and The Invisible Man. We make a habit of exploring terror together.
Watching Possession with my spouse didn’t awaken any controversial discussion nor did it change the way I view my marriage. Rather, my marriage changed the way I saw Possession, which made the film far more potent than when I first saw it as a college kid.
In essence, because I am married, the theoretical pain of losing my sense of happiness made watching Sam Neil lose his marriage in the film all the more impactful.
Possession is a film that comes from pain. Zulawski famously directed the film after divorcing from his wife, actress Malgorzata Braunek. The scene in the film where Neil comes home to find his son alone in his wife’s apartment, smeared in jam, drew from a very real event in Zulawski’s life where he found his son in a similar state.
When I was younger, I actually thought Sam Neil was the least interesting part of the film. Whenever he was on screen, I kept wanting to get back to Adjani’s intense performance. What I found boring then I found immensely compelling now. And what I found immensely compelling then I found…almost painfully horrific.
Being a married man, you understand the complexity of emotions Neil relays with Mark. You can see as an audience member that Mark’s relationship with Anna is incredibly unhealthy. The erotic passion is gone from their marriage, yet at the same time, Mark needs Anna in his life. He won’t touch her when coming home for the first time, but is fiercely possessive of her when he realizes there is someone else. There is a hypocrisy to Mark that becomes more glaring after marriage.
Marriage is a bond between two people. It’s supposed to be an act of loyalty, of combining your life with someone else’s, and thus prioritizing their needs often over your own. You put so much of your identity into being a part of something bigger than just yourself. If that isn’t reciprocated, you can’t help but feel…empty as a result.
Seeing Mark’s emotional decay, contrasted with Anna’s own deteriorating state into ecstatic existential agony, hits harder when you identify as part of a union more so than just as an individual. You realize that you fear ever having to feel that union break apart – and, once you realize you have that fear, you are emotionally invested, even if Mark does something terrible, like striking his wife.
I also was more invested in Heinrich’s story as well—and, to my surprise, the story of the two private investigators who turn out to be romantically involved. I didn’t expect such a positive portrayal of two gay men in a film of this era, though that comes with the caveat that both men are quickly killed off after their initial appearance and it’s contrasted with Heinrich’s campy, predatory bisexual character, which has aged like the sour milk Anna sprays across the subway walls.
The human drama that I once found almost alienating now captivated me, so much so that, when we entered into the existential second half of Possession, I was taken for an even further ride.
“I’m the Maker of My Own Evil”
Sam Neil once said regarding Possession, “I call it the most extreme film I’ve ever made, in every possible respect, and he asked of us things I wouldn’t and couldn’t go to now. And I think I only just escaped that film with my sanity barely intact.”
If Neil barely left with his sanity intact, Adjani claimed the film left her traumatized, with rumors indicating she might have tried killing herself after filming wrapped. It’s impossible to state why a film can traumatize its actors. However, perhaps it had much to do with the intensity of Adjani’s performance, mixed with the sheer existential despair felt by the character.
Anna’s character is plagued by doubts. She wonders what life could have been like for her if she made different choices, demonstrated by her haunting monologues in the latter half of the film. She searches for release in any external being to bring her meaning—first, her husband, later God, later still Heinrich, and, ultimately, the entity she keeps in that second apartment.
Anna’s eruption in the subway tunnel now has a far deeper meaning to me. It isn’t just an arresting performance accompanied by some gruesome makeup. It’s raw, existential horror in the face of unspeakable bleakness. It is the realization that these bonds that connect us to each other and even the cycle of life are fragile and easily broken, with anything going wrong and nothing having any meaning – other than the meaning we are willing to put into something.
This ties into the haunting speech made by Heinrich’s mother, upon learning her son is no more. She kills herself immediately after talking to Mark about her son’s death, reflecting she has no interest in the world now that her son, with whom she shared everything, is gone. She makes a statement discussing how good it probably is to believe the soul lives on in the afterlife, only to dismiss it as a fantasy.
I don’t take this as a real comment on religious belief or not – though the idea of the utter cessation of existence is a horrifying one. Rather, I see this as the idea that the world, once your loved ones disappear from it, feels over. There’s nothing but memory left, which can leave the world feeling hollow. I feel this inner destruction is externalized in the film’s climatic final minutes.
The ending of Possession is truly grotesque. We see Mark cover up Anna’s murders, finish off Heinrich, before getting gunned down by people connected to the work that sent him out of Berlin in the first place. Anna is also shot down, but the entity lives on. Mark and Anna’s son Bob recognizes immediately that the doppelganger, when he comes to collect him from the watchful care of his teacher (also played by Adjani), Bob would rather drown himself. Much as how Heinrich’s mother would rather die than live in a world without Heinrich, Bob would rather die than live in a world with the entity.
Throughout the film, we see that the more intimate the entity is with Anna, the more human it becomes, eventually becoming Mark’s doppelganger. What this entity is supposed to represent is up to the audience’s interpretation. I can see someone coming off of watching The Omen trilogy seeing this entity as an Antichrist figure—thanks in part to Neil’s performance as an elder Damian Thorne.
When I first saw Possession as a college student, I saw the entity merely as a Lovecraftian horror. Some tentacled monster or alien meant to illicit fear for being just so bizarre. In my rewatch, I saw the entity as a manifestation of existential dread. Formless, amorphous, feeding off our energy and attention until, ultimately, it manifests as something familiar. It blends with the familiar until it, ultimately, entirely replaces it.
“Almost.”
When Possession debuted, audiences didn’t get it. This is not a film I think you’re supposed to get when you first see it – and if you claim you do, rewatch it. Now, with it streaming on Shudder, Possession can reach a whole new audience.
I know many horror fans won’t get the film. I really didn’t at first. I had to get married to understand more of the film than I had before, and, I fear, the older I become, the more about the film I will understand.
What I know is that Possession features characters experiencing something I never want to experience: the deterioration of marriage and a total loss of existential identity. Watching the film dragged me emotionally into an existential spiral, one that stuck with me for days after seeing it. Considering my takeaway from the film as a college student was “It has tentacles,” I’d say that’s a huge difference.
At the same time, I really love this movie. Did it hurt to watch? Absolutely. But it hurt in a way that offers validation at the end. I am now enraptured in the tentacles of this film, feeding it meaning as it offers me a reflection of life, weird and nightmarish all at once. In many ways…it’s too hard to live with. When I’m away from it, I think of Possession as a monster or a woman possessed, but then I see it again and all this disappears.
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