Possession (1981)

Directed by Andrzej Żuławski. Starring Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani, Heinz Bennent, Shaun Lawton, Margit Carstensen, Michael Hogben, Johanna Hofer. [R]

Audacious, unpredictable psychological horror opus won’t be for all tastes, to say the least, but should be hard to shake for those who stick with it. Żuławski’s sole English-language film manages a plausible transition from its real-life inspirations and Bergman-esque open-wound revelation of marital strife to a nightmarish “imagination or reality?” world of writhing tentacle monsters, doppelgängers, and physical manifestations of anguish, rage and evil. Neill is an enigma, as cold as he is impassioned, lean with malice and clammy with despair; Adjani goes for broke in the film’s most startling sequence, a high-wire act of wrenching and convulsive “possession” in a subway tunnel; Bennent gives a bizarrely swishy and animated supporting performance as Adjani’s supposed lover; and the gliding, swooping wide-angle camera is a character of its own, toggling its visualization of the engorging madness between the aesthetics of a propulsive 1970s thriller and of a stark, intimate kitchen sink drama. So emotionally devastating (and exhausting), all the ghastly grossness falls away like melting flesh in the aftermath, its rawboned exposure as horrific as any bloody miscarriage or slippery entanglement of inhuman ecstasy. Critically-panned and controversial enough upon release that the U.S. import was shortened by almost a third of its runtime; years later, critical reappraisal and a cult following for the original cut continues to slowly grow.

85/100