Possession (1981)

It’s like Kramer vs. Kramer with a little bit of tentacle hentai sprinkled in for flavor.

I’m gonna be honest - it took me a while to get into the swing of this movie and understand its wavelength. I have not seen a film that functions like this before. The style of acting is very different, and there are layers to it that I didn’t immediately grasp. You have to surrender to it and let it wash over you.

At its core, this is an intense movie about a marriage crumbling and the complex feelings intertwined in that dissolution. But to understand what makes this so raw and unhinged, you need to know what Andrzej Żuławski was going through when he made it.

Żuławski had been exiled from Communist Poland after his previous film was banned by the government. He lost his country, his career there, and his marriage fell apart in the process. So when he made Possession, he was channeling genuine rage and grief - not just about the divorce, but about losing everything at once. The film becomes this howl of pain about multiple ruptures happening simultaneously: personal, political, creative.

What’s fascinating is how he externalizes all of that trauma into literal monsters. The creature that grows from Anna’s affair isn’t just a metaphor for infidelity - it’s Żuławski processing his own sense of being replaced, both in his marriage and in his homeland. He was exiled from Poland and watching from a distance as the country he loved continued without him, just like Mark watches his wife’s life continue without him. The doppelgängers that appear later feel like they represent that specifically - the way life moves on and creates replacement versions of what you lost.

Filming this right next to the Berlin Wall in West Germany was an inspired choice that adds another layer. Żuławski couldn’t go back to Poland - the wall represented that literal barrier between him and his past life. You can feel the threat of that barrier closing in throughout the film. The alleyways feel like they’re shrinking, the wall getting closer, creating this suffocating sense of claustrophobia that mirrors both the emotional entrapment of the failing marriage and the political imprisonment of exile. The wall is always there in the background, this massive concrete reminder of division and separation.

It’s clear that the Suspiria remake was strongly inspired by this film and took a lot of cues from its approach to framing a narrative next to the wall as a symbol of broader historical trauma bleeding into personal lives.

The creature design is very phallic, very interesting, disgusting, and deeply horny. It’s exactly what you’d expect to emerge from the wreckage of sexual dysfunction and marital rage filtered through a man who’s lost everything and is trying to make sense of it through body horror.

I do think this movie would benefit from another watch to fully understand what’s happening. When I say I wasn’t on the same wavelength initially, I mean I didn’t know if things were literally happening or if we were seeing impressions of events filtered through extreme emotion. But honestly, most events on screen should be taken as an unreliable narrator’s emotional experience of real events - amplified to 12 on the emotional scale but rooted in actual happenings. That’s Żuławski’s grieving mind processing reality.

I did not anticipate this turning into a doppelgänger film. I had no idea what the tentacle creature was going to become, and I was highly satisfied by where it goes. The doubling feels so connected to Żuławski’s experience of exile - there’s a version of him that still exists in Poland, a life he might have had if things had gone differently.

This will be a repeat watch for me, and I highly recommend it. It’s more like a supernatural thriller with some gory homunculus body horror action - not exactly a pure horror movie, though I get why it was marketed that way.

Also, that subway scene is iconic. A five-minute screaming, full-body breakdown while giving birth to a demon miscarriage is incredible cinema. Adjani’s performance in that sequence alone is worth the price of admission. That’s not just acting - that’s exorcism.

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