Possession [DVD] [1981]
![Possession [DVD] [1981]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OwqUyXSEL._SL160_.jpg)
United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), WIDESCREEN (1.66:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Anamorphic Widescreen, Cast/Crew Interview(s), Interactive Menu, Making Of, Photo Gallery, Scene Access, Uncut, SYNOPSIS: Usually misattributed to the horror genre, this challenging and highly unusual drama stars Isabelle Adjani as a young woman who forsakes her husband (Sam Neill) and her lover (Heinz Bennent) for a bizarre, tentacled creature that she keeps in a run-down Berlin apartment. In the beginning, her husband knows nothing about the monster and sincerely believes that his wife is insane. He has her tailed by private detectives, whom she kills and feeds to the creature. Still unaware of what has happened, the husband contends with the reserved and inadvertently seductive presence of his wife’s look-alike (also played by Adjani), a schoolteacher who frequently comes to tutor his son while his wife is away. Though tempted by her quiet goodness and beauty, he is still passionately in love with his wife and even after he finds out about the murders, he stays by her side and helps her conceal her crimes. Filmed amidst the oppressive backdrop of the Berlin Wall by the expatriate Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (who was unable to work in his homeland after too many clashes with the authorities), the picture is so relentlessly intense and so deliberately esoteric, that most viewers would find it too hard to connect with. Still its symbolism, its unbridled and flashy directorial style, and the tour de force performance by Isabelle Adjani earned this unique tale a cult following in Europe. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: BAFTA Awards, Cannes Film Festival, Ceasar Awards, Fantasporto Awards, …Possession (Uncut) (1981)
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Art horror brain melt,
Possession is totally extraordinary.
Packed with symbolism it can be read on so many possible levels of interpretation it’s bewildering.
Set in a European city (obviously Berlin during its partition) in an alienating mixture of ultra modern buildings and decaying grandeur, visually it evokes a sense of dislocation. The plot can’t easily be summarised without foretelling too many of the surprises the film contains. Thematically, it seems to be a study of a marriage in the last phase of destruction, with Sam Neill returning from doing a mysterious job (spying?) and meeting his wife played by Isabelle Adjani, whose agitated reaction to his arrival only hints at the deep levels of disturbance she enacts as the film progresses.
What follows is a nightmarish and surreal two hours of startling images, bizarre acting and frequent bloodletting.
If you liked Antichrist you will be interested to see a lot of similar themes in Possession – misogyny, madness, faith, evil and lust permeate a fractured dreamscape with a sustained and unique oddness.
I was put in mind of J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Polanski, Cronenberg and David Lynch, but Zulawski’s film is totally unique.
Possession was put on the banned list during the Video Nasties era, but don’t come to it expecting anything like any of the more exploitation films I’ve seen off the DPP 39, Possession is as challenging an art-horror as I’ve ever seen.
Highly recommended.
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|For lovers of the bizarre,
I’d love to know if David Lynch saw this film back in the early eighties and if so, what he made of it. I was struck by the amount of Lynchian tropes here – shifting identities, acting that veers from mannered to hysterical in an instant, disregard of narrative in favour of the symbolic, hell, even a pair of blue velvet curtains put in an appearance. As this was made in 1981, years before Blue Velvet and Lost Highway I figure it must have seeped into his subconscious somehow. I’m not complaining by the way, I love DLs films and I loved this, it looks amazing – brilliantly shot and hypnotic and it uses its Berlin setting wonderfully well. My only quibble – we could have lost some of the rambling, pretentious monologues and still retained the essential core weirdness of the film. Recommended (although not if you are seeking a gory horror – forget all that video nasty rubbish, the terror here is mainly of the cerebal variety)
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|we told you so.,
but no one was listening..
i used to watch this amazing black and apocalyptic horror comedy (that’s surely what it really is?) with half a dozen still-at-schoolfriends in near empty London cinemas every rare time it was shown, for many, many years. sometimes we would be the only ones there. as at one particular Scala all-nighter.
glad but also a little sad that it’s at last become installed as a “cult classic”.
i guess we kind of felt we “owned it”.
buy
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