Possession and the Lovecraftian Ordeal of Divorce
When is a David Lynch movie not a David Lynch movie?
It’s not often that you find a horror movie that is genuinely unpleasant and truly horrifying. The concept is a moving target. What scares or unsettles one person isn’t going to move another. I’ve seen people talk about how upsetting Martyrs is and I’ve seen people talk about how upsetting House of 1000 Corpses is and it all seems like a really broad menu of possibility. Our individual sensibilities differ or, most commonly, horror movie filmmakers don’t know or don’t care what makes a movie that’ll shift the audience’s consciousness to an emotionally perilous place. Emotions are subjective and fear is probably the most subjective of them all because the functions of the brain that creates them is so closely tied to our individual experiences. When it comes to horror, the movies that really reach into the core of me and shake me are uncanny. It’s a hard thing to describe but what I mean by that is that movies featuring people behaving strangely or unpredictably get to me. Movies where things are out of place in a fundamentally strange way have an equally strange effect on me. Reality becomes inconsistent from moment to moment and you can’t forecast where anything is going. An example: the movie Ju-On gets right the fuck under my skin. I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s a great horror movie but it’s also a little hammy and one of the many Japanese yurei movies that meant to cash in on the wild international success of Ringu. But the spooks within zero in on that x-factor in me that puts me ill at ease. The ghosts of Kayako and Toshio haunt Rika in strange ways. They appear to her in places where no one should be. They appear to her in places that are stereotypically portrayed in film as symbols of safety. Ju-On upends the entire notion of the ghost story and gets to the heart of what it is to be truly haunted. Possession is a lot like that. It portrays the ordinary in a way that feels simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, putting the viewer in treacherous emotional territory.
Finding horror movies like these is a feeling on par with putting on a coat you haven’t worn since last winter and finding twenty bucks in the pocket and I can’t help but analyze the experience endlessly. It’s a rare treat and when I finally caught up with Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession recently, I recognized that I had found another such film to ruminate on endlessly.
Possession is hard to put into words. It’s a series of non sequiturs in constant motion, all in orbit around a central theme of divorce and separation. Critics over the years have struggled with the label horror film on this one because critics of art film are cowards and the words horror and film put together conjure images of lowbrow splatter fare for children, repelling any notion of legitimacy. See also: A24. But Possession is one hundred percent horror movie. It’s the horror of watching a long and loving relationship unravel in slow motion until nothing is left but acrimony. It’s the horror of powerlessly watching someone you love slip away to madness. It’s the horror of coming to understand that this person you love leads a second life parallel to your own where they foster the birth of a horrible tentacle monster in a squalid apartment in another part of town.
Wait. What?
Taking place in Berlin in the late-war period of the Cold War, the film stars Sam Neill as Mark, a spy for unnamed forces of the western world. He returns home to their apartment in West Berlin from a mission to find his home in disarray. His wife Anna, played brilliantly by Isabelle Adjani, is in a severe state of distress and inexplicably wants a divorce. Her behavior is off the charts crazy, leaving Mark desperate in his attempts to get a handle on the situation and as things progress he slowly puts what few outrageous pieces emerge from the murky depths of mystery to learn that his wife has been seeing another dude and spends long stretches of time elsewhere in the city, leaving their five year old son on his own for days at a time. Doesn’t sound too scary, right?
Wrong.
Most horror movies try to get to you through conventional means. They direct the script toward unsettling themes and territory or they resort to simple violence and gore to get their point across and Possession definitely has some of that but it also mixes numerous other elements into the recipe for an end-product that is complex and unique. It effortlessly conjures your own memories of your worst breakups and the dissonant mixture of simultaneous love and anger for a person you’re breaking away from but can’t shut off the feelings of adoration that are no longer appropriate. Every single scene in this movie is a grueling ordeal thanks to this syndrome of qualities. The characters alone aren’t driving this movie, either. There’s a thousand characteristics which transform a simple story of anguish into a greater whole of terrible things. Notice how the sets are almost always unnervingly neutral-colored. Everything is white. There are few accents of color in any scene. Anna wears the same dress in every scene she’s in, in spite of the film seeming to take place over a period of weeks or months. The city is white. The apartment is white. Mark’s clothing is white. Heinrich’s clothing is white. Everything is fucking white in this movie except for Adjani’s strange blue dress and the occasional spatter of blood. The camera is also constantly, anxiously in motion. It dramatically sweeps across and through sets. As Mark meets with his agency handlers, the camera circles around them all, menacingly. It moves through and around the apartments as the characters occupy them, sometimes outrunning them into empty rooms as the drama continues to unfold elsewhere. It’s as though the cameraman is incapable of handling the tension and needs to get away. And the way everyone conducts themselves in every scene lies on the extremes of behavior. Anna is wildly loose and disturbed, screaming and flailing through each scene while Mark is wound tightly light a spool of guitar strings, rocking and shaking violently. And the soundtrack! Fuck that business! It throbs and buzzes beneath the mayhem like a teeth-grinding buzz from dirty speed. Żuławski and his crew pour every bad vibe and nasty idea they have into every scene, creating a sustained attack that is mercifully anxious in its quiet moments and utterly ruthless in what remains. Throughout numerous points in the film I had to consciously relax my body and I’m only talking about the early moments of the movie, before the truly strange qualities drop in, including the notoriously violent and unsettling subway scene which seems to mark the start of Anna’s descent into madness.
In time, other characters are introduced who ratchet up the tension. Their son’s teacher, Mark discovers, is a dead ringer for his wife (she’s also played by Adjani in a wig and contact lenses), and her side piece, Heinrich, a swaggering drug addict for whom Anna is a conquest meant only to symbolize his supremacy over other men. If all of this sounds a little specific, it’s probably because it is, as only a few years prior to the production of this film, Żuławski endured a brutal divorce from his wife, actress, Malgorzata Braunek. But it doesn’t end there, Żuławski was also forced to flee his native Poland for France if he intended to keep on making movies. This was the era of The Iron Curtain and Poland’s Politburo takes great umbrage with anything so much as seeming to critique the communist party there. The setting of Berlin isn’t lost on me, either. After several years adrift on the seas of fate, Żuławski made a movie intended to be an emotional dumping ground, a primal, animal scream into the void so thick with vitriol that it somehow managed to transcend Scenes From A Marriage and manifested as something truly horrific and cosmic in a Lovecraftian sense.
Żuławski is careful in Possession to examine both sides of the breakup. It could have very easily been a one-sided “why me?” analog of the Book of Job but blame is equally assigned. Mark is a man of secrets. What he does for a living is wicked and leaves a scorch on the psyche of the world. He goes away for long periods of time, leaving Anna with no knowledge of his whereabouts and returns for short stints before vanishing again into the landscape of Cold War intrigue. He has hardly any relationship with his son. To the two of them left behind, he may as well be a total stranger. But love is what it is and Anna wants to love Mark but the loneliness and anger, the deep anguish of a miscarriage, the intense longing for a loving partner, it all culminates in the manifestation of a terrible abomination in a filthy apartment across town. It leaves a body count so destructive in its wake, starting with the people closest to you and then infecting the people closest to them. Through parthenogenesis Anna creates an ideal version of her husband but it takes time to come together. Likewise, Mark’s idealized version of his wife appears as a doppleganger, but fully formed and like the horrors of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothery, they weave an unbreakable obsession and madness into the ordinary people who witness them. The only way forward is to embrace the crazy and go in head-first and bring these horrors fully to life. It’s like when your friend tries to comfort you, saying, “It’s not the end of the world.” It certainly feels like that to you and because Possession is the movie that it is, it is the end of the world when you’ve come undone, fully.
Possession is a truly upsetting experience. Through masterful direction, production, and acting it pulls the viewer in, infecting you with the same dread and horror that the cast is experiencing. It is masterfully crafted, a truly unique movie full of unbelievable performances both earnest and weird. On the surface everyone looks to be overindulging in their craft but when compared to traumatic breakups of your own, the flailing and screaming comes into startling clarity and becomes familiar and acutely unpleasant and relatable. Far be it from me to recommend subjecting yourself to such an ordeal but if you’re still reading this then I can assume safely that you’re a lot like me and the extremes of experience are the sort of thing that you eagerly pursue.
Ya gotta see, Possession.