Horror Without Comfort or Explanation

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MOVIE REVIEW
Possession
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Genre: Psychological Horror, Drama
Year Released: 1981, Second Sight 4K 2025
Runtime: 2h 4m
Director(s): Andrzej Żuławski
Writer(s): Andrzej Żuławski, Frederic Tuten
Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.secondsightfilms.co.uk

RAVING REVIEW: POSSESSION is not a film that allows you to gain comfort; it corners you, overwhelms you, and dares you to endure it. Andrzej Żuławski’s notorious psychological horror has earned its reputation not for its infamous imagery alone, but for how relentlessly it externalizes emotional collapse. This is a film that treats the end of a marriage as an extinction-level event, where love curdles into something monstrous and irreparable. This is one of those films that I’ve not only owned for a long time, but somehow never watched before. This release gave me the perfect excuse to watch it in the best possible format, finally.

Set against the divided world of Cold War Berlin, the story follows Mark and Anna as their relationship disintegrates into hysteria, violence, and metaphysical rupture. The city itself becomes a silent accomplice, its concrete walls and empty spaces reflecting the emotional dead zones between the characters. Żuławski doesn’t use Berlin symbolically; the division is blunt, omnipresent, and intentionally exhausting.

Isabelle Adjani’s performance remains one of the most physically and emotionally drastic ever captured on film. Her portrayal of Anna isn’t designed to elicit sympathy in conventional terms. It’s a sustained act of psychological exposure, stripping away restraint until nothing remains but impulse. The infamous subway sequence is not shocking for its content, but for its total abandonment of performative control. Adjani does not suggest breakdown; she inhabits it.

Sam Neill matches her intensity with a different, but equally punishing approach. His portrayal of Mark is rigid, suspicious, and increasingly unmoored, a man who believes logic can still impose order on emotional chaos. That belief becomes his undoing. The film frames his need for clarity as another form of delusion, no less destructive than Anna’s unraveling.

What separates POSSESSION from other relationship-driven horror films is its refusal to offer metaphor as a safe interpretive distance. The allegory is not hidden beneath the surface; it is the surface. Żuławski renders emotional trauma literal, grotesque, and unavoidable. Infidelity becomes biological; resentment manifests as flesh; desire transforms into something inhuman. There is no version of this story where abstraction provides relief.

The film’s pacing is confrontational by design. Scenes stretch beyond comfort, dialogue erupts into screaming without warning, and moments of quiet feel temporary at best. This structure mirrors the characters' emotional experience, in which tension never resolves and release never arrives. Watching POSSESSION is not about narrative satisfaction; it is about sustained immersion in psychological distress.

Carlo Rambaldi’s creature effects, often discussed as a defining feature, are almost secondary to the performances surrounding them. The horror does not originate from the monster itself, but from what it represents: emotional displacement, unmet desire, and the impossible fantasy of replacement. The creature exists because the characters cannot coexist, not the other way around.

Żuławski’s direction is uncompromising, sometimes bordering on hostile. The camera is aggressive, compositions feel intentionally unstable, and shifts arrive without warning. This is not a film interested in elegance or restraint. Its power comes from excess: emotional, physical, and aesthetic. That excess is what makes it so difficult for some viewers to engage with and so unforgettable for others.

The Second Sight 4K restoration underscores just how carefully constructed the chaos actually is. Details once lost in early transfers now reveal a precision beneath the madness, from the stark color palette to the controlled use of space and movement. The film’s reputation as unhinged remains, but it is not careless. Every escalation is deliberate, every confrontation engineered to deny comfort. The extensive supplemental material contextualizes the film’s original reception, its censorship history, and its enduring influence on psychological and body horror cinema.

POSSESSION is not meant to be liked, recommended casually, or revisited lightly. It is an experience that demands endurance rather than appreciation. Its brilliance lies in its refusal to compromise, to soften its message, or to reassure its audience that meaning will arrive. Love, in Żuławski’s worldview, is not redemptive; it is destabilizing, consuming, and potentially annihilating.

Decades later, POSSESSION feels dangerous in a way few films dare to be. It remains a work that challenges not just genre boundaries, but the limits of emotional representation on screen. For those willing to engage with it on its own brutal terms, it stands as one of the most uncompromising examinations of relational collapse ever committed to film.

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[photo courtesy of SECOND SIGHT FILMS]

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