This is not an overly coherent movie. There are ideas that seem to be just thrown in for the hell of it and are not followed through. At the start of the movie Mark (Sam Neill) is apparently an intelligence agent who has just returned from a lengthy mission. We see a glimpse of the Berlin Wall so we know we’re in Berlin, therefore we assume he was undercover behind the Iron Curtain. This is potentially an intriguing angle for a horror movie to explore - spies exist in a world of deception where nobody is what he appears to be. But we hear no more about Mark’s job as a spy. It’s as if the writers just totally forgot about it. This is all too typical of this movie.
Mark is married to Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and they have a small son, Bob.Their marriage is falling apart. He suspects that she has been unfaithful. We don’t really know what led up to this or how long the marriage has been rocky. We never do find out.
They both give the impression of being deranged babbling lunatics.
Mark finally discovers that Anna has been having an affair with Heinrich. Mark goes nuts, but he goes nuts about everything. Mark confronts Heinrich, and that doesn’t go well.
And then Mark discovers that Heinrich is not his only rival. And his other rival is much stranger.
We get lots more shouting and lots more histrionics. Then we see the monster. Then there are lots of gross-out scenes. When the monster appears the pacing, which was slow enough to begin with, becomes positively glacial. Something is going to happen connected with the monster but it takes forever to happen. And there will be further developments in the marital drama between Mark and Anna, and that takes forever to resolve.
In the meantime Mark has become involved with Helen. Helen is Bob’s schoolteacher. Helen is also played by Isabelle Adjani. It’s like Anna and Helen are two sides of the same woman, with Anna being the bad girl and Helen being the good girl. Maybe each of us has a good side and a bad side. Maybe that explains everything about the human condition. It’s a struggle between good and evil. Pretty deep stuff. We’re talking philosophy here man.
There’s a sub-plot involving a private eye, which also drags. And eventually we get to the infamous tentacle sex scene. Which is as un-erotic as the rest of the movie.
And what does it all mean in the end? I haven’t the remotest idea. That’s not necessarily a flaw. Some of my favourite movies are those that leave the audience wondering what on earth has actually been going on, and wondering what it all meant.
If that sort of thing is done well then you’re left wanting to see the movie again in the hope of teasing out a bit more of the meaning. You’re left perplexed but fascinated. If it’s done badly, you end up simply not caring that nothing made sense. And that, alas, was my response to this movie.
Both Sam Neill (a very fine actor) and Isabelle Adjani give performances that are somewhat incoherent and histrionic.
The performances are totally insane right from the start. We don’t get to see a gradual descent into madness, which might have been interesting. So we don’t get to know them as people. We never see them as anything other than crazed nutters. We have no idea what made Mark tick before he went crazy because we only see him as a crazy person. We have no idea what made Anna tick before she became a psycho because we only see her as a psycho. We do see Mark become more and more unhinged and we do see him descend into complete madness but I think it’s a weakness of the film that he’s already unstable right from the beginning. His descent into madness doesn’t really surprise us. He seems like the sort of guy who is already close to cracking up.
There’s also no gradual build-up as things get progressively stranger. Even when nothing strange at all is happening everyone is shouting hysterically and throwing things. So when strange things do start to happen the impact is lost. These are people who would put their fists through the kitchen wall if they burnt the toast.
Watching strange crazy things happening to strange crazy people isn’t that interesting. It’s what you expect to see happening to such people. It has no shock value. It’s a lot more interesting to see strange crazy things happening to relatively normal, or at least relatively sane, people.
This is what happens when you get a non-horror director trying to make a horror movie. They don’t understand the genre and they make a mess of things.
I loved crazy messed-up trippy weird movies. I love movies that are surreal and disturbing. I even love movies that combine horror with artiness. But just because a movie is crazy and messed-up and trippy and weird and has arty pretensions doesn’t make it a good movie. I don’t think Possession is a particularly good movie of this type.
If you’re going to make a weird movie you have to choose a particular kind of weirdness and stick to it. Even if the viewers never do figure out what is really happening and what it all means they have to at least feel that all the weirdness they’ve seen was in some way connected.
Listening to the audio commentary by the director it’s obvious that this was a very personal film for him. I can’t help thinking it was just too personal. It’s all based on the break-up of a relationship which happened to him, and all the characters are based on real people who were involved in that event. The result is that the movie is packed with minor details that have a deep personal significance for Zulawski, but which are not going to have any significance for the viewer. There are lots of things that make vague sense when he explains them, but when the director has to explain what various things in his movie mean then to me that is bad film-making.
As a horror movie I think Possession fails. It isn’t scary and it isn’t horrifying and it isn’t creepy. There are moments that are disgustingly gross but genuine creepiness requires more than grossness. I suspect that Zulawski thought he was adding a fairytale element to his domestic melodrama but I can’t see that it serves much purpose.
But I don’t think Zulawski had any intention of making a horror movie as such. It’s a story of personality disintegration (made literal in the doubling of Anna and Helen) and the monster is merely some kind of metaphor.
I didn’t like this movie at all but in fairness I should point out that almost everybody disagrees with me on this!
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