10 Most Disturbing Films: #1 Possession by Andrzej Zulawski

Director Andrzej Zulawski took all of the chaos, rage and confusion of his divorce and rolled it into this nasty treat. Though some insist that this incredibly intense drama doesn't qualify as a horror movie, the film's most notable sequences (of which there are many) all partake of the horrific, one way or another. That this has consigned a brilliant drama to a genre ghetto is regrettable but not altogether unappropriate.



Isabelle Adjani, who won a Gold Palm at Cannes for her unbelievably intense performance, plays Anna, a woman who is ready to divorce her husband Mark, a traveling spy based in Cold War Berlin, played despairingly by Sam Neill. Nor is she content with her strange lover, Heinrich, who is spastically eccentric and into occult sexual energy theories. It seems that the men in her life are driving her mad. But this doesn't quite explain what happens next as Anna gives birth in a subway tunnel to what turns out to be her own tentacled demon-lover.

There are many layers and possible interpretations to this film. In 1981, I saw the badly slashed 80 minute American release at the theater. I found it to be nonsensically disturbing and very hard to follow. It left me with that,"What the fuck?" feeling. Later, when I came across the Anchor Bay version that restored 30 minutes of plot, many of my questions still remained unanswered. There is much that is deliberately left open-ended and this, in many ways, increases the impact of the film, much in the same way that David Lynch's more obtuse efforts do. One is left to fill in the missing pieces with one's imagination.

With all of the horrific elements in play, it's hard to believe that the deepest impact comes from seeing a marriage disintegrate so spectacularly. This is the film's central horror, the dark, beating heart of the story. And it is a testament to the power of Zulawski's artistry and personal vision that Possession transcends the gimmickry-and-frisson that typifies horror cinema, even as it ultimately relies on that genre for marketing. The performances of Adjani and Neill are so strong and convey such excessive emotional turmoil that viewers may find it all quite exhausting. The experience is so involving and the acting so convincing that the appearance of the devilish love-squid squirming and pumping Anna in flagrante delicto almost seems like a natural development or even a lesser horror.

As if all this weren't quite enough, Adjani and Neill play their own dopplegangers, there is an open-ended espionage plot concerning a dangerous man with pink socks, and an ominous, eschatological ending coupled with unforgettable sounds. It's safe to say that there is no other film like Possession.

In "The Theater and Its Double," Antonin Artaud wrote a prescription that seems to have been filled by cinema in this case:

"I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire in records but are incapable of originating among ourselves."

Because of its undeniable impact, bizarre vision, and depth that merits repeat viewings, Possession seizes the top spot on this list of Most Disturbing Films with its amorous tentacles.