Zulawski’s infamous cult horror about a couple’s disintegrating marriage is as deranged a film as any, featuring a terrifying performance for the ages by Cannes Best Actress winner Isabelle Adjani.

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There are films about disintegrating marriages, and then there is Possession, a work so horrifying that its infamy in the cult horror canon remains undisputed. 

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski, one of Poland’s most provocative directors, Possession stars Sam Neill as a man with a wife who doesn’t even bother to hide her infidelity.  As he hires a detective to trail her, things start to unravel in unimaginably sinister ways. 

This is my third Zulawski after That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) and On the Silver Globe (1988), both exceptional pictures, with Possession pretty much cementing my fascination with this one-of-a-kind filmmaker. 

Isabelle Adjani, who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role here as Anna, gives a terrifying performance for the ages. 

Look no further than that subway sequence where she goes absolutely mental—I’ve never seen a character in cinema becoming this possessed, masterfully captured in a soul-shaking long take that makes even The Exorcist (1973) feel like a walk in the park. 

“For the first time, you look vulgar to me.”

Adjani embodies the primal nature of fear, both bearer and victim of it.  At the start, the performances do feel way over-the-top, bordering on unrealism; by its climax, however, the deranged quality of Zulawski’s film makes everything feel debilitatingly normal. 

Psychologically, Possession eats into your sanity and the only way to escape its clutches is to intellectualise the whole damn thing. 

Sure it’s an allegory of binary tension, not just of husband vs. wife, but also the political ideology of East vs. West Germany (the film was shot in Berlin, outside of the director’s native Poland where he had been ‘dispossessed’ due to the state’s suppression of his creative expression). 

Above all, the film is about conditional oppression, of the desire to control or be controlled.  There are several shots of spiral staircases, and in one sequence, clearly a nod to Zulawski’s compatriot, the great Andrzej Wajda’s first feature, A Generation (1955).  They become symbolic of a losing mind, a topsy-turvy one-way trip to hell. 

Grade: A

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