Possum: The Things We Carry

I really like allegorical scary movies. They work a lot like nightmares, in that they’re rooted in real fears or anxieties we have, but we’re denied all of the defenses that we use to keep fear at bay during waking hours. They press some primal fear button in the back of our brain that more glib, formulaic films miss to focus on cheap startle effects.

Possum is not an especially subtle allegory, but it is very effective, a stark, haunting, story about long-repressed trauma and guilt.

The film begins with a voiceover reciting what sounds like a nursery rhyme about a sinister character called Possum. There is a man, who we will eventually learn is named Philip, taking a train to the small English town of Fallmarsh. He sits ill at ease on the train, a leather bag in his hands, listening to some schoolboys behind him discuss some mysterious bit of business centering around the town’s abandoned army barracks. They view Philip with some distaste and suspicion. You don’t really blame them, Philip’s pasty, with nervous, red-rimmed eyes and a twitchy demeanor. He’s, well, creepy.

Philip disembarks at Fallmarsh, and walks to a dilapidated home sort of in the middle of nowhere. There’s a man there - Maurice - who seems to be expecting him, but not especially happy to see him. Philip is a puppeteer, and there’s been some unpleasantness at the school where he was employed, a “scandal” around a show he put on. Philip thinks it’ll blow over. Maurice doesn’t seem so sure. There’s something in the leather bag that Philip keeps trying to get rid of, but he can’t. Maurice is some kind of father figure to Philip. Philip has come home.

On television, it is reported that one of the schoolboys from the train has gone missing.

It’s hard to really sum up the premise of this film, because it doesn’t really have a plot to speak of, just the cyclical repetition and interpolation of locations and images, all hinting at something terrible, like the intersection of nightmare and uncovered memory: What’s in the bag? What’s behind the door in Philip’s house that he keeps hesitating to open? Why does he call it his house, and who is Maurice, if not his father? What happened to Philip when he was younger? Why does Philip keep a storybook hidden under the floorboards of his bedroom? All we can take away is that sometime in the past, something terrible happened to Philip, and it’s never really left him. The film is a process of gradual revelation and connecting of dots that blends nightmare with reality to communicate Philip’s mental state - it isn’t ever really clear how much of what we’re seeing is real and how much of it is metaphor, but it doesn’t really matter since this is a film more felt than understood as a conventional narrative.

The overwhelming majority of the movie is Philip, who seems broken and alienated and increasingly ill at ease in the world around him, and Maurice, who seems faintly vile and unwholesome and whose interactions with Philip suggest the long history of an abusive parent accustomed to being in complete control. Philip is carrying something around with him - literally, in the leather bag that takes on an almost supernatural quality - that he is trying to be rid of, but can’t quite seem to shake. It isn’t an especially subtle metaphor, but that’s not really the point - we’re supposed to see it for what it is, because the point of the film is Philip coming to grips with something he’s been carrying around with him for his entire life. His childhood guilt and trauma are externalized as the terrible thing that is in this bag. A lot goes unsaid, or is talked around, but between Philip’s twitchy affect, Maurice’s creepiness, the accumulation of little nagging ambiguities (why won’t he go into that one room?) and stories about missing students past and present, all point to the feeling that something very bad is on the verge of being revealed, and although we can make our guesses about what everything means, the film doesn’t give enough away to confirm any one explanation until the very end, so the constant shifting uncertainty also works to keep us feeling uneasy. Every frame is suffused with dread - the weather is constantly overcast, interiors are steeped in squalor and shadows, everywhere is rife with urban decay, backed with a soundtrack of electronics, ambient hums, and discordant strings. Nothing here is new or clean, and the sun hangs red and low in the sky when we see it at all.

Its oblique and elliptical nature mostly works for it because it never lets up on the feeling of unnerving dread, and so even when nothing’s actually happening, there’s still the lingering unease of something just waiting to happen, and though the filmmakers mostly do a good job of pacing the story, there are places where it flags a little, where the revisiting of places and ideas feel like the film is spinning its wheels, but it doesn’t last for long. There’s a mystery here, and the worst thing you can do when you have a mystery that you’re doling out one cryptic clue at a time is not pay it off, but the film does in a way that is not totally out of left-field, but is shocking nonetheless in its intensity and suddenness. The setting, the cinematography, the sound, and the acting and character choice permeate everything with a sense of wrongness, a sense that there’s something very bad hidden just around the corner, and in the final act, as Philip comes to grips with what he’s been carrying around with him the whole time, all the masks come off and the horrible truth is revealed in a sharp denouement that is almost cathartic in its horror, as if something poisonous is being purged from Philip, if not from the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon