If you sit down to watch Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, be prepared to experience a different kind of a horror movie in plot, characters, style, and tone. At the same time, it’s an uneasy blend of psychological drama with moments of romance, mystery, and horror popping in and out as the story moves to its conclusion.
Starting with the return of Mark (Sam Neil), a German intelligence operative, to his home in Berlin, the story features the bizarre behavior of Mark’s wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) who has asked Mark for a divorce. Leaving their young son with him, Anna would disappear apparently at the place of the man she has been seeing behind Mark’s back. But things become more sinister down the road when Anna is revealed to be possessed by an evil creature using her for a wicked purpose.
Mixing psychological and creature horror isn’t the truly odd side of Possession. It’s the break with conventional storytelling and character development in the horror genre that gives this movie a spot among the outliers in horror cinema. The emotional reactions of the protagonist couple filmed in an air of uncertainty and with some hidden secret knocking on the threshold of consciousness envelops the viewer’s attention with the fear of the unknown. Even when the monstrous creature is revealed, the real reason why it keeps the woman hostage remains a mystery until the very end.
Possession has an element of bizarre, or eerie, showing in all major elements of the movie. The oddly behaving and at times weird-looking characters, the camera angles, and lacunae in the plot all falling together at the end without actually equating reality – all make this movie an unusual horror creature feature. It’s an animal you take to the lab for dissection to see what isn’t visible on the outside.
