Possession

82 State Street,Newburyport MA 01950

29 October, 2021

Description

"Extreme but essential viewing." – Tom Huddleston, Time Out After its release in the UK in 1981, Possession was banned and subsequently shown in the U.S. only in a dramatically edited 81-minute version. Here, a newly restored version of Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is presented in its full form. It’s an experience unlike any other. Sam Neill plays Mark, a businessman and possible spy who returns to his home in West Berlin to find that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has fallen in love with someone else and is demanding a divorce. Almost immediately, he goes mad with hurt and fury, and the two lock into a desperate, hysterical, bloody clash. From there, things only get more intense, so when the film takes a turn into supernatural horror, the development feels oddly inevitable — as though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along. Adjani won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance, but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking. With its pulsating score and writhing imagery, Possession commits to a cinematic delirium that’s intoxicating. Few movies convey so viscerally what it’s like to go mad, or to experience the twisted relationship between love and the desire to hold or control another person. This is not just a horror movie you take your friends to for a laugh or a shudder; this is what you watch with your ex and realize how much worse things could have been.