Possession: That Escalated Quickly

I’ve watched a lot of scary movies. A lot. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that over time, I’ve noticed myself getting more…not jaded, exactly, but harder to surprise. Watch enough average horror films, you start to notice formulas. The more obvious the formulas are, the harder it is to engage with the film or really be affected by it. Luckily, they aren’t all average, but after awhile the ones that really make an impression get farther and farther apart.

Possession was very much a surprise, start to finish. It’s singular in its vision, and one of those rare horror films that actually captures the feeling of a nightmare.

It’s the story of Mark and Anna, a married couple living in 1980s West Berlin with their son Bob. Mark is away from home a lot for work, and when the film opens, Mark has come home after an extended stretch elsewhere, and things are…strained.

So the film starts off like a sort of European take on relationship dramas like Kramer Vs. Kramer, where most of the action revolves around a couple’s dissection of their own relationship as it falls apart, and the emotional aftermath of that. Mark spends a lot of time away from home for work, and Anna’s dissatisfied with the marriage. Maybe it’s that he’s never around, maybe it’s that she finds that she doesn’t mind him not being around, maybe she’s realizing how little identity of her own she has. Mark doesn’t take it well, Anna’s sort of all over the place emotionally. None of this is new, in that respect. But almost immediately, bits of strangeness start creeping in around the edges.

The weirdness begins in the film’s tone. It’s melodramatic almost to the point of comedy, especially in the first act. The dialogue is loaded with quasi-philosophical musings about identity and being, emotions are played one way - loud - and the characters regularly faint or collapse, sometimes for apparent reasons, sometimes not. It starts off playing almost like a parody of European art films, or at least what a mass audience might imagine those films to be like. We go from “polite conversation about ending the marriage” to “screaming match and throwing furniture in a café” to “four days into a bender, curled up filthy and sobbing on the floor of a trashed hotel room” in the span of the first five minutes or so. And this movie is a little over two hours long. It’s like “well, that escalated quickly.”

And so at first it plays as funny, but soon enough, the skin of an end-of-the-marriage story splits to reveal the much, much stranger bones underneath. Anna isn’t just unhappy with the marriage, she doesn’t just have a lover (Heinrich, who’s exactly as creepy and loathsome as he needs to be, and as much of a cartoon as everyone else in the film), she’s also vanishing for days at a time with no notice. Mark doesn’t know where she’s going. Heinrich doesn’t know either. And every time she comes back, she comes back more unbalanced. She comes back stranger. And Mark isn’t doing any better either. The abrupt cuts from one scene to the next that originally felt funny start to feel jagged and dislocating, like we’re witnessing the moments of lucidity between blackouts or fugue states. And then when we find out where Anna’s been going, at the end of the first act, shit starts getting really weird in a direction I don’t think you could predict from what came before. And it’s just the beginning.

As things begin to get stranger and stranger, it all starts to feel like we’re the audience to a nightmare. The literal and metaphoric are all mashed up, like internal emotional states are being played out externally, but it’s all played up front - nothing is presented as dreams or hallucinations. The result is something that almost feels a little like opera in how over-the-top and stylized it is, and the full-throttle approach gives it a lunatic verve. This is not a movie that moves from scene to scene as much as it careens from scene to scene, and if you think you know what’s coming next, you really don’t. Shifts in time, space, perspective, all played to the rafters, but even if the details are sometimes a little murky, the feeling is clear through out - profound alienation, estrangement, and derangement from the self as well as others.

As events progress, the film pulls equally from psychological and body horror as we watch Mark and Anna’s deepest fears, insecurities and obsessions play out in a world that feels shifted just to the left of one we might recognize. Why is Bob’s teacher a dead ringer for Anna? What exactly does Mark do for a living? What happened to Anna in the subway that night? The film is filled with little odd details - the view of the Berlin Wall from their apartment provides a menacing backdrop to everything that occurs. Conversations about custody and visitation are accompanied by the chopping of raw meat. Mark, in the throes of a loud public argument is tackled by chefs in toques and full whites. On the surface there’s nothing that unusual about any of it, but in juxtaposition it all feels off - slightly to start, and then more and more over time.

It shouldn’t work, this fever-pitched fever dream, but it largely does (things do start to get a little muddled in the third act), and it’s because everyone completely commits and just fucking goes for it, without a single wink or bit of ironic distancing. I can’t really directly compare this to anything else I’ve seen, but it does fall along a thematic line that also contains The Brood before it, and Hellraiser and Antichrist after it, in that it’s a film about desire stretched into bizarre forms and making internal emotional violence and personal disintegration horrifyingly external. If it seems like I’ve thrown it in with other films that bear no resemblance to each other, well, trust me - you’ve probably never seen anything like this before, and if you’re up for the cask-strength weird shit, it’s one to seek out.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon