Żuławski’s film begins where most narratives fear to linger: after love has failed, after language has collapsed, after the couple has already entered the purgatory of mutual incomprehension. Divorce here is not a legal procedure but an ontological disaster. Marriage has not ended; it has metastasized into something unrecognizable. The domestic sphere becomes a battlefield littered with accusations, silences, repetitions that circle one another like trapped animals. What the film understands with terrifying clarity is that separation does not resolve intimacy – it radicalizes it. Once love collapses, it does not leave emptiness; it leaves behind a pressure vacuum into which something else rushes.
At the center of this maelstrom is Isabelle Adjani’s Anna, a performance so extreme that even now it resists assimilation into the usual vocabulary of acting. One does not watch Adjani so much as endure her. She does not represent madness; she incarnates it. Her body becomes a site of insurrection, her movements violating not only social norms but anatomical plausibility. She bends, jerks, spasms as if inhabited by an intelligence hostile to human form. And yet nothing about this feels arbitrary. There is precision in the excess, intention in the hysteria. Her performance is not chaos; it is rigor pushed beyond the threshold of comfort.
What makes Adjani’s work here so unsettling is not simply its intensity, but its refusal of metaphorical safety. Possession is not a symbol for marital breakdown, or Cold War paranoia, or psychological trauma – though it contains all of these. It insists, instead, on literalization. The horror is not what the breakdown signifies; it is the breakdown, given flesh. Anna does not stand in for psychic disintegration; she undergoes it, publicly, obscenely, without the courtesy of abstraction. The film denies the viewer the luxury of distance.
Her face, often framed in close-up, becomes an unstable surface upon which emotions flicker too quickly to be named. Joy collapses into terror, terror into ecstasy, ecstasy into something almost theological in its violence. The eyes seem permanently on the verge of seeing something the rest of the world has been spared. And when she smiles – and there are moments when she does – the expression is unbearable, not because it is false, but because it suggests a truth incompatible with survival.
The infamous subway scene remains the film’s gravitational center, not because it shocks, but because it clarifies. In that cavernous, indifferent space – neither public nor private, merely infrastructural – Anna’s body stages a rebellion against coherence itself. She convulses, spills, collapses, rises again, her movements oscillating between childbirth and execution. Milk, blood, viscera: substances associated with nourishment and life are expelled as waste. Creation and destruction fuse. Watching this sequence on a large screen is to feel the film reach through the apparatus and seize the viewer by the throat. There is no allegory left here, only event.
What Adjani achieves in this moment – and throughout the film – is the exposure of the body as an unreliable container. Flesh does not protect identity; it betrays it. The self leaks. The boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve. Possession, in this sense, is not an invasion from outside but a revelation of what was already waiting inside, patiently, for permission to emerge.
Żuławski’s genius lies in his refusal to psychologize this eruption into safety. The film gestures toward psychiatry, toward explanation, toward diagnosis – and then abandons them with contempt. Doctors appear, institutions loom, but none possess interpretive authority. Language fails repeatedly. Characters speak past one another, repeat themselves, shout words stripped of communicative function. Dialogue becomes noise, incantation, ritualized aggression. Meaning is not clarified through speech; it disintegrates.
This linguistic breakdown mirrors the film’s broader metaphysical anxiety. Possession is haunted by the suspicion that identity itself is an artificial construct, maintained through effort and compromise, and that when those supports are withdrawn, something inhuman rushes forward to claim the vacancy. Anna’s “otherness” is not merely sexual or psychological – it is ontological. She becomes other to herself. And this self-alienation is depicted not as tragedy alone, but as revelation. There is terror here, yes, but also a terrible lucidity.
Love, in this film, is not redemptive. It is corrosive. It does not heal wounds; it exposes them, widens them, insists they be inhabited. The marriage at the film’s core is not destroyed by infidelity or misunderstanding but by the unbearable demand for authenticity. Each partner demands the other be real, wholly present, fully known. The film suggests that this demand is itself monstrous. To be fully known is to be annihilated. To be fully authentic is to abandon the compromises that make coexistence possible.
Adjani’s Anna is often accused – by characters within the film, and by viewers seeking moral footing – of hysteria, cruelty, irresponsibility. But the film quietly indicts these accusations. What if her madness is not deviation but honesty? What if her refusal to remain coherent is a form of resistance against a world that demands performance over truth? The film does not absolve her, but it refuses to simplify her. She is not victim or villain. She is a breach.
The creature – unspeakable, obscene, tentacular – functions less as monster than as proof. It is the obscene remainder produced when intimacy is pursued without illusion. It is what love becomes when stripped of metaphor and restraint. The film refuses to tell us whether it is supernatural, psychological, or symbolic, because to do so would be to contain it. The creature is precisely what escapes containment. It is the surplus generated by desire pushed beyond the limits of human form.
Watching Possession beneath a museum devoted to natural history sharpened this realization. Museums exist to reassure us that the world is classifiable, that anomalies can be named, that even extinction can be rendered orderly. Żuławski’s film is an anti-museum. It catalogues nothing. It preserves nothing. It insists that certain phenomena – love, madness, identity – cannot be stabilized without being falsified. What survives preservation is no longer alive.
Adjani’s performance becomes, in this light, an act of refusal. She refuses restraint, refuses likability, refuses legibility. She sacrifices the comforts of craft to achieve something closer to exposure. There is anger in this performance – not performative anger, but existential rage. Rage at the insufficiency of language, at the violence of intimacy, at the expectation that one remain intelligible even as one is dissolving.
The film’s political and historical resonances – its Berlin setting, its Cold War paranoia, its atmosphere of surveillance and division – hover like afterimages, never quite solidifying into thesis. This is appropriate. Possession is not a film about systems; it is a film about what systems do to bodies and relationships when they hollow them out. The wall dividing the city mirrors the walls dividing the self. Both are presented as artificial, violently maintained, and destined to collapse.
By the time the film reaches its apocalyptic conclusion, exhaustion replaces shock. The film has already said everything it needs to say through repetition, escalation, attrition. What remains is silence, aftermath, the sense that something irreversible has occurred. There is no catharsis here, no restoration of order. The ending does not resolve the film’s tensions; it fossilizes them, leaving the viewer with the uneasy sense of having witnessed a process rather than a story.
What lingers most, days later, is not the imagery – though it is indelible – but the film’s philosophical cruelty. Possession suggests that the self is not a sanctuary but a battlefield, that intimacy is not shelter but exposure, that authenticity may be incompatible with survival. It dares to ask whether sanity is merely a socially sanctioned form of repression, and whether madness is sometimes the price of refusing to lie.
Adjani’s Anna becomes, in retrospect, less a possessed woman than a prophet without scripture. She speaks in gestures because words have failed. She convulses because language can no longer contain what she knows. Her body becomes a text written in pain, legible only to those willing to read without consolation.
Leaving the screening, ascending from the basement into the museum’s orderly corridors, I felt the dissonance acutely. Glass cases gleamed. Labels reassured. People laughed. But something had shifted. The film had made visible the fragility of these arrangements, the thinness of the membrane separating order from convulsion. It reminded me that beneath every taxonomy lies a chaos it cannot admit, and beneath every relationship, a terror it politely ignores.
Possession endures not because it shocks, but because it refuses to anesthetize. It does not allow the viewer to retreat into metaphor or genre. It insists that horror is not elsewhere – that it is embedded in the structures we rely on most: love, identity, language. Adjani’s performance, uncompromising and incandescent, serves as the film’s open wound, refusing closure.
This is not a film one watches repeatedly for pleasure. It is a film one returns to out of necessity, when illusions have worn thin and the lies we tell ourselves begin to sound false. It does not explain the human condition. It exposes it – raw, furious, and unsustainable.
Like all true possessions, it does not end when the screen goes dark.
It follows.
It waits.
It knows where you live.
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