‘I’m the maker of my own evil…’
OK. So, here is a film that was banned in the UK until 1999. It boasts a fresh faced Sam Neill in the starring role. It concerns doppelgangers and metaphysics. And it’s bloody disgusting. Tick, tick and tick. And yet…
When Mark (Neill) returns home to West Berlin from some kind of espionage based work trip, he is confronted with his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) demanding a divorce. This happens within the first ten minutes and everything after this moment is completely inexplicable. Characters arrive. Characters leave. There is an extremely long scene in which Anna has a miscarriage resulting in lots of red and green ooze flowing everywhere. One chap is drowned in a public toilet. It’s all utterly infuriating and relentlessly bizarre. And yet, I did mostly find Possession to be pretty captivating.
Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s only English language film is apparently a metaphor for his own divorce and rising political tensions during the cold war. It is also clearly influenced by both Repulsion and the work of David Cronenberg whilst still remaining very much its own thing. Adjani took years to get over the mental toll this film took on her and her committed performance is truly a sight to behold. Neill too fully invests in the project and the result is a truly demented and haunting final product. The issue is that this is a difficult film. It’s arty. It’s avant garde. So, over two hours of it felt a bit much. Within that two hours I would say that I had a grasp of the plot for around 10% of that time. Even for me, that’s low.
A challenging film then, and one that I would certainly never dream of watching again, but also something genuinely unique and distinct.