Possession (1981)
You know, whenever you decide to watch a cult classic, there's a 50/50 chance it's gonna be one of the most boring things you've ever seen, or something that'll absolutely blow your mind. Fortunately, Possession was the latter.
Possession is an art house horror movie directed by polish film maker Andrzej Zulawski and starring pre Jurassic Park Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani. Possession tells the story of a couple in West Berlin going through a nasty divorce that eventually takes an even more disturbing turn when it turns out that wife Anna harbors a dark secret. I am being deliberately vague here, but hear me out. As unwarranted this phrase usually is, Possession is a movie that you should experience knowing as little about it as possible.
The first half of the film establishes a tone of heightened melodrama. People don't just express their emotions, their emotions run away with them. They yell and scream, they cry and they sneer, they demolish the furniture of their sparsely decorated apartments, they angrily rock back and forth in a rocking chair. Neil and Adjani deliver a pair of truly unhinged performances, probably some of the most unhinged ones you're ever gonna see, but just as you start to accept that this is a story about mad people you realize it's really the story of a mad world.
If Kubrick saw The Shining as a story about the horrors of domestic abuse, Zulawski aims to portray the horror of a mutually abusive relationship. People who bring out the worst in each other and can't let go of each other because only at their worst, they feel like themselves.
And the funny thing is, this is the note Possession is starting off on. Eventually dark secrets and supernatural mysteries are introduced into what's already a highly tense relationship drama and that's where it goes really off the rails. Zulawski takes this operatic melodrama setup and adds lynchian doppelgängers, cronenbergian body horror and just a dash of kafkaesque paranoia and religious metaphysics until it unfolds into a microcosm of the writer-directors entire worldview at the time.
It certainly feels like Zulawski's theory on everything (though mainly human relationships) which is as overwhelming and unhinged as it is compelling. It feels both intimately personal and aggressively confrontational. You really see how everyone involved is writing, directing and acting their heart out not despite but because of how weird and personal their project is. It's a movie that feels larger than life, its performances and dialogue frequently so overwrought that it comes off as funny (which I'm pretty sure was at least partially intentional.) but that's part of what makes it such an engaging watch.
It's one of those movies that remind me that no matter how many weird movies I watch, there'll always be movies that are weird in ways I haven't seen before.