The worst sin a film can commit is being thick and uninteresting. A filmgoer implicitly commits to a state of extreme passivity for roughly two hours in a darkened room with only their eyes and ears permitted to receive whatever the screen has to offer. What’s being delivered better not be boring. Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” (1981), a needling and grotesque psychological horror story about a divorce set a stone’s throw from the Cold War-era Berlin Wall, is not boring.
As the gooey practical effects, violence and visual hysteria compound into an unrelenting cinematic nightmare, though, you might wonder what other kinds of sins a film can commit. And what your personal breaking point is.
There were no walkouts at the Brattle’s recent screening of the film (except for one regular, who seemed to stay just long enough to catch the famous “subway station miscarriage” scene). “Possession,” however much it might make you squirm in your seat, is part of the established canon and still packs an arthouse theater decades after release.
The basic plot, a messy divorce played out between a husband, Mark, played by Sam Neill, and a wife, Anna, played by Isabelle Adjani (who won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the role), is merely a starting point for Żuławski’s byzantine fantasy, which crisscrosses between the realms of reality and surreality with giddy abandon. The director plays up Berlin’s atmosphere of repression and implicit violence for all it’s worth as the ex-couple navigates subplots of espionage, custody battles, secret lovers, doppelgängers and an oozing murderous monster.
By the end of the film all the main characters die, all the main characters live, and you won’t be sure what it is you just saw.
In other words, an exotic and esoteric experience, but not one without a certain precedent and lineage within the history of film. Żuławski follows on the heels of filmmaking greats with a taste for probing psychological thrills such as Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. He made “Possession” in the 1980s alongside other emerging auteurs of dark-sided inner space including David Lynch and David Cronenberg. This tradition remains alive with anxiety-core directors such as Darren Aronofsky and the Safdie brothers, whose cinema of apoplexy repels and attracts all at once.
Filmgoers, it seems, never tire of bad trips onscreen. And if they can make it through two hours of some of the most challenging examples of this type of cinema, which deliver tension but not catharsis, maybe they’ve learned something about themselves, if not about the world or “Possession.” So one hopes, anyway.
“Possession” Written and Directed by Andrzej Żuławski. Starring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Heinz Bennent. Running time: 124 minutes. Genres: Drama, Horror. Rated R.
“Possession” screens Sept. 24 at The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Harvard Square, Cambridge. Tickets for this film and others for the “The Weird Wild World of Sam Neill” retrospective, running through Sept. 23, can be purchased online and at the box office.
