Secret agent Mark (Sam Neill, THE FINAL CONFLICT) returns to Berlin from a mission and refuses further assignment in order to address issues at home with his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani, CAMILLE CLAUDEL) and young son Bob (Michael Hogben). Although she swears that there is no one else, Anna nevertheless wants a divorce, sending Mark into an emotional tailspin. He eventually discovers that she has been having an affair with New Agey Heinrich (Heinz Bennentt, THE LAST METRO) – to whom she is drawn "because you say 'I' for me" – but even he claims not to have seen her for some time as they agreed to put some distance between them while she sorts out her uncoupling from Mark.
In spite of her claims that she no longer loves Mark and that he disgusts her, Anna never truly pushes him away; and the mystery of where she goes and who else she sees becomes an obsession to both her husband and her lover in spite of the seemingly healthier alternative – certainly healthier than his self-loathing dalliance with Anna's caustic best friend Margit (Margit Carstensen, TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES) – of Mark's burgeoning relationship with Bob's schoolteacher Helen who is inexplicably an exact double for Anna. When the two private detectives Mark has hired to follow his wife mysteriously vanish, Heinrich and Mark separately discover the nature of Anna's mystery lover and how far she (and one of them as well) will go to protect him (or it?)
Reportedly pitched by Zulawski to Paramount as a film about "a woman who fucks an octopus" and later described by Adjani Рwho won a C̩sar award for best actress for the film the same year that she won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for QUARTET Рas "emotional pornography," POSSESSION is one long "dark night of the soul" in which a domestic situation brings up philosophical questions of death, birth, and faith in a slimy and bloody manner. Although there is an element of "body horror", the film is more Cronenbergian in its THE BROOD-like fantastical depiction of a dysfunctional family involving a custody dispute in which both sides remain ignorant of the amount of psychological damage they do to their child and a woman whose inner conflict is monstrously externalized. Also Cronenbergian is the exchange in which Mark tells Heinrich that God to him is a disease and Heinrich's response to that is that "through disease we can reach God."
While Zulawski's own divorce seems raw in the way it informs the script – and he obviously hates the equivalent of the Heinrich character who is otherwise as incredibly entertaining as he is smug – he seems to recognize that his being "at war with women" is a projection. Zulawski has Anna's double Helen noting that there is "nothing in common among women except menstruation" and that she finds pathetic "these stories of women contaminating the universe"; indeed, her claim to come "from a place where evil seems easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the flesh" makes one wonder if Mark might have somehow generated her as an idealized vision not only of his wife but also of himself in how certain and exacting she is about her beliefs compared to the doubts lurking beneath his own inscrutable "secret agent" image.
Shot in a seemingly depopulate West Berlin bordering the wall – with Mark's secret agent cronies threateningly lurking around the border as they observe his apartment – and suffused with the color blue in overcast daylight, cool moonlight, and Anna's dark dress, the film's cold world is as punctuated visually by red bloodshed as it is by surprisingly tender moments like Mark's moments playing with his son, comforting this night terrors, lying beside Helen in a moment that is as equally sexless as an earlier mirroring scene with Anna yet "warmer", and Mark's inability to be either cruel or entirely dishonest to Heinrich's mother (Johanna Hofer, VERONIKA VOSS) who is ready to depart the world when she is sure that Heinrich's own soul is no longer united with his body. In spite of some weighty philosophical rumination – particularly Adjani's tearful and wrenching monologue about faith and chance – the film also has some wickedly funny moments such as when Mark who knows of his wife's apparent madness but not yet the nature of her lover taunts Heinrich with "Perhaps you met God a moment ago and you didn't even realize it" while Heinrich's attempt to extort money out of Mark to keep his silence about what he has seen is expressed as "You have to get me out of here, and send me on a long trip to restore my harmony!"
Neill, Adjani, and Bennent give wild performances that seem undisciplined but riveting, and anchored by supporting bits – including Adjani's dual role – and the mobile photography of Adjani's then-lover Bruno Nyutten (who later directed her in CAMILLE CLAUDEL) and the electronic scoring of Zulawski regular Andrzej Korsynski. The "special effects for the creature" of Carlo Rambaldi (KING KONG) are difficult to assess in that the gestation of the creature is obscured by darkness, blood, and slime while the climactic reveal of its pre-humanoid state seems more like a bizarre latex sculptural art piece than a monster. Stripped of its horror, POSSESSION seems like it would be less of a histrionic KRAMER VS. KRAMER than more akin to Nouchka van Brakel's A WOMAN LIKE EVE in which a depressed housewife's enforced holiday to the South of France opens her up to the discovery of an attraction to another woman that has a disruptive effect on her marriage (including a custody dispute and the discovery that her best friend has attempted to supplant her in bed with her husband and as the mother of her children). The film seems to have been an influence on the British sci-fi film XTRO which melds a domestic drama with alien rape and grotesque births, as well as HELLRAISER in which a woman and her domicile become a mantrap to provide nourishment to her gestating lover.
Released theatrically in the United States by short-lived distributor Limelight International in a version that not only trimmed roughly forty minutes of the two hour plus running time but also moved scenes around, rescored some sequences to the more overtly horrific, and added some solarization opticals, it was in this form that POSSESSION first landed on home video from Vestron. While the curious could track down the letterboxed Japanese-subtitled laserdisc and VHS import, POSSESSION was not seen in its complete form in the states officially until Anchor Bay's 2000 DVD (during their more adventurous years of output). The film made its Blu-ray bow in 2013 in the UK from Second Sight followed by a 2014 mega special edition stateside from Mondo Vision using the same master with additional color correction supervised by Zulawski.
Earlier this year, French boutique label put out UHD and Blu-ray editions featuring a new 4K restoration with baked-in SDR grading, and that is what Umbrella have used for their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray which differs in some striking ways in terms of brightness with more highlights seeming to be preserved in the older master which also has darker and richer colors and healthier flesh tones. The newer master is still not a bad way to watch the film, but if Mondo Vision or another company decide to tackle the film on UHD, hopefully their either get access to the 4K raw scan or do another scan for HDR grading and more faithful SDR. Some DVD versions of the film floated around with an incorrect music track featuring some different cues. Mondo Vision included this as a lossy option on their disc, but Umbrella's sole English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track is the correct one, and its an overall clean track where the differences between the sync sound and post-dubbed voices are apparent but not distracting. Optional English HoH subtitles are also included.
Extras start off with the audio commentary by Zulawski and biographer Daniel Bird recorded for the Anchor Bay DVD in which the director discusses the autobiographical aspects involving the breakdown of his marriage and his professional career with the shutdown of ON THE SILVER GLOBE, ending up in a hotel in New York with Paramount paying him, his "octopus" pitch being rejected by Gulf and Western, the fable aspect of the story, his reasons for selecting the "divided city" of Berlin, casting Adjani and Neill – contrasting Adjani's diva attitude and Neill's rigorous preparation – the blue look of the film and color psychology, convincing immigrants and homeless people to clear the street in the Turkish district by claiming he was making a film about the human heart, and his feelings about the Rambaldi creation.
Also included is the audio commentary by screenwriter Frederic Tuten recorded for the Second Sight edition in which the writer recalls being recommended to Zulawski by screenwriter Daniele Thompson, daughter of director G̩rard Oury, whom Zulawski had first asked to collaborate with him on the dialogue. He warmly recalls working with him on the script, visitng the set, the casting РSam Waterston (SWEET WILLIAM) was initially in the running for the Neill role Рbeing called back to the set to write around the deletion of the character of Anna's first husband, and his feelings about the creature which he believed would only be subliminally-glimpsed if at all.
"The Other Side of the Wall" (51:42) – shot for the 2009 German DVD and since reedited as the end credits cite both 2009 and 2012 copyrights – is a worthy companion to the two tracks, with Zulawski and Tuten expanding on their anecdotes with the added participation of producer Marie-Laure Reyre – who came on after the original debt-ridden producer vanished – and camera operator Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz. Reyre recalls that they tried to get Neill's MY BRILLIANT CAREER co-star Judy Davis before him when Adjani turned them down, and that Zulawski did not know that his chosen cinematographer Nyutten was involved with Adjani when he convinced her to do the film. Jaroszewicz discusses the use of wide angle lenses in the film and what that meant for the "total organization" of long take scenes and the logistics of shooting in Mark's tiny apartment. Tuten's contributions include additional compelling thoughts about the Anna's existential plight and how the creature is birthed of it. The opening narration's parallels between POSSESSION and the genesis of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" are also worth pondering. There is also an interview with Zulawski (36:01) covering a lot of the same ground but nuanced in other areas like the breakup of his marriage, leaving Poland after ON THE SILVER GLOBE was shut down, his feelings about Anna and Heinrich and particularly about the character of Anna's first husband – an older man, a writer, a Jew living in Berlin – and how not only was the actor a casting mistake but he realized that the character actually further obfuscated rather than clarified Anna's background.
The disc also includes the film's U.S. theatrical cut (77:10) from a VHS source for the curious. While this version in unquestionably inferior, it is worth seeing for the effort small distributor Limelight took to make this arthouse film marketable as a horror film as well as one particularly unnervingly effective change. Without the context of Mark watching Heinrich's home movie, the shaky handheld photography of the scene of Anna's dance class just looks avant-garde, and it seems that it is us the audience rather than Heinrich the cameraman to which Anna delivers her monologue, particularly the bit where she looks straight at the camera and says "That's why I'm with you.” The "Repossessed" (12:29) from the Mondo Vision edition – which did not include the US cut – demonstrates that not only did the US distributors trim and rescore parts of the film, they redubbed the phone calls to Mark with a demonic voice, and also had access to outtakes footage (including the shot of Anna holding a pair of eyes floating in the fluid of her miscarriage which was shot for but not used in the film).
"A Divided City" (7:19) is a location comparison featurette in which we not only see the transformation of areas around the torn down wall but also that the area around Mark's apartment is now riddled with graffiti while the former Turkish district has been somewhat gentrified. "The Sounds of POSSESSION" (19:06) is an interview with composer Andrzej Korzynski who recalls meeting Zulawski in primary school, staying friends with him as they went their separate ways, and being suggested by Zulawski when Paramount needed someone to replace some of the rejected score for the LE GRABUGE on which the director was working as an assistant. He then runs down his uses of music on THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT, THE DEVIL, ON THE SLIVER GLOBE, and POSSESSION with a look at his vintage synthesizer equipment.
"Our Friend in the West" (6:40) is an interview with producer Christian Ferry who had been working with Fox when Antonin Litvak recommended he meet Zulawski who had assisted him on NIGHT OF THE GENERALS. Ferry invited him to the west to work with him by way of hiring him to re-edit and rewrite parts of LE GRABUGE Рnicknamed "garbage" Рand later optioned Christopher Frank's novel "La Nuit Am̩ricaine" for Zulawski who made it into L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AIMER and he would serve as line producer on POSSESSION.
The disc also includes "Basha" (5:55), a short documentary on POSSESSION poster artist Barbara Baranowska, as well as the film's international theatrical trailer (2:47), and the U.S. theatrical trailer (1:57). The cover insert is double-sided with different artwork motifs one each face while the synopses and list of extras are printed on the back of the slipcover.
