Possession

Żuławski wrote this during his own divorce and filmed it as though the form of cinema were also coming apart. Nobody in Possession performs at a level a normal film could contain. Adjani screams, convulses, laughs and bleeds through a performance that reportedly cost her years, and Sam Neill — twelve months before Omen III and a decade before Jurassic Park — matches her by playing a man whose reasonableness is itself a symptom.

Describing the plot makes it sound like a creature feature, which it technically is. Mark returns to Berlin from an unexplained job to find Anna wants to leave him. There is a lover, Heinrich, who is ridiculous. There is a daughter nobody is parenting. And there is an apartment on a condemned street where Anna is keeping a thing made of meat and tentacles that she is sleeping with and that is slowly becoming a man.

It is the most honest divorce film ever made

The creature is not a metaphor you decode and set aside. It is what the film has instead of an explanation, and it works because every human scene around it operates at the same pitch. These people do not argue like characters in a drama; they argue like people in the last month of something, saying the unsurvivable thing and then needing to continue the conversation anyway. The famous subway sequence — Adjani alone in a corridor, coming apart — is not a horror set piece. It is the film's thesis performed without dialogue.

Żuławski shot it in a divided Berlin that is doing an enormous amount of unspoken work. The Wall is in the background of scene after scene, nobody mentions it, and the film is about two people who have built one.

Why it was almost unseeable

It was cut, banned and bootlegged for decades — a UK video nasty, unavailable in anything like a watchable transfer in America until a 2021 restoration. Its reputation was built on degraded tapes, which is appropriate for a film that looks like it is degrading while you watch it.

It is not for everybody and it is not trying to be. There is no craft argument that makes the last twenty minutes legible. But nothing else in the index is doing what it does, and for the same register in a tighter film, The Fly is the obvious next step; for the same bleakness scored even lower, Martyrs.

The short answer: the film does not resolve, and it is built not to. Anna's creature finishes becoming a double of Mark. Anna asks Mark to kill her and he does. Mark is shot on a staircase by police. Helen — the schoolteacher who is Anna's physical double, played by Adjani in a second role — is left with Mark's son and with something at the door wearing Mark's face, while a green light comes through the window and the boy refuses to let it in.

What is the creature?

The film never says, and the refusal is the point. It arrives as a mass of tissue in a locked apartment, Anna feeds it, she has sex with it, and across the film it organises itself into a human shape that is recognisably Mark. The usable readings are that Anna is building a version of her husband she can stand, that the thing is the marriage itself given a body, and that it is simply a creature and the film means it literally. Żuławski offers no evidence for any of them over the others.

What is the point of the doubles?

Anna and Helen look identical and behave as opposites — Anna is chaos, Helen is patience and good with the child. The creature becomes a double of Mark. By the end the film has produced a second, more liveable version of both halves of a marriage, which is the cruellest joke in it: the replacements are better and nobody wanted them.

Why does the film become unreadable at the end?

Because the characters do. The final ten minutes abandon continuity of place and motive in a way that is clearly deliberate — the dialogue stops answering itself, the green light has no source, the boy's refusal is not explained. A film that has spent two hours arguing that a marriage ending is an event beyond the reach of sense ends by refusing to make sense. That is consistent rather than careless, and whether it is also satisfying is a matter of taste.

What does the green light mean?

Nothing the film will confirm. It arrives with the Mark-double, it is the last image, and it has been read as the thing coming for them, as an air raid, as grace, and as nothing at all. If you need the film to tell you, it will not.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 006 is the headline. Only 7 works in the entire index score lower, which makes this the second-bleakest film we have scored. There is no relief, no humour that is not painful, and no character who ends better than they began.

Reality anchor 092 is near the ceiling. 100 works score lower. It ranks joint-fourth on that axis of everything we score, and first among our films — not stylishly strange, structurally strange.

Viscera 060 is above the median and not what you remember it for — 73 works score lower. There is blood, there is the creature, and there is a famously difficult sequence with an electric carving knife. But the film's damage is almost entirely performative rather than visual.

Era bias 018 is deep analog, with only 31 works lower. Grainy 1981 Berlin on film stock, available light, and a mix that sounds like it was recorded in the room.

Threat 035 sits on the supernatural side, though the real harm in the film is done by two people to each other.

On jump scares: none. The film is relentless at a level that makes a jump scare irrelevant.