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Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neil (playing it amusingly over-the-top in an early role) star as a married couple on the rocks. Yelling, screaming and electric knife fights ensue as well as Adjana's character giving birth to a slimy tentacle creature in a subway who she proceeds to get sexual pleasure from and feeds would be lovers to. In other words - War Of The Roses on crack.

This Cannes film festival winner is one strange veiwing experience. A combination of avante garde and horror, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's Possession has been internationally praised for it's eerie, hypnotic tone and gruesomely shocking sequences. The bottom line though is that this is a completely self-indulgent, tedious time that seems to go on and on without ever fully captivating the viewer.

It's beautifully shot with some great performances from the leads but the whole thing ends up being one big frustration that leaves you cold. Whether that's the director's intent or not doesn't forgive this for being a colossal bore. Even the much talked about subway birth scene isn't really much to talk about.

When this originally hit North American shores it was trimmed by almost fifty minutes! Anchor Bay has released this on DVD fully remastered and fully uncut. In other words - more time we'll never get back.

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In director Andrzej Zulawski's commentary for his film "Possession" he declares, "Films don't want to bite anymore, they want to lick." Well, get out the tongue depressor boys 'cause "Possession" bites like a mad, hungry dog. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill star in this genre jumper that is half psychological character study and half horror splatter film. Adjani and Neill play Anna and Mark, a young couple in Berlin whose marriage is already an open, gapping wound before the first frame of the film is revealed. Anna, in particular, reacts to Mark with intense loathing and sexual disgust. So much so that she abandons him and their young son for an illicit, carnal affair with what turns out to be with a monster (a sticky, slithery, tentacled Carlo Rambaldi creation) borne out of her own uncontained lust.

Zulawski's cinema of pain starts at a fever pitch with jumpy, jagged scenes and with the performances played at a mentally deranged, unhinged level. Adjani referred to the film as "psychological pornography" and she isn't kidding. Zulawski brings excess to a new level as he has his two lead actors perform like careening psychopaths. Adjani's performance is a case study of free-range hysteria -- the high point being a crazed fit of psychic abortion in a subway station that brings to mind the voodoo-induced spasms of Maya Deren's "Divine Horsemen." (Adjani won the Palm D'Or for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for this performance.) Zulawski, who wrote the film during the throes of a nasty and bitter divorce, peppers the film with such marital hatred that it even filters down to the supporting players (Mark tells Anna's friend, "I loathe you, Margie" and she responds, "I love seeing you miserable -- it's so reassuring.") No wonder in a film etched with such nasty bitterness that the whole enterprise climaxes in an open-ended apocalypse.

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Plot: Secret agent Marc returns home from an assignment only for his wife Anna to tell him that she is leaving him for another man, Heinrich. The breakup causes their mutual sanities to fray. He becomes involved with their son’s teacher Helen who resembles Anna. She kills several people and gives birth to a bizarre creature in a subway. He hires two detectives to follow her and eventually discovers that her new lover is a tentacular creature.

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This bizarre oddity was a film that nobody quite knew what to make of it when it came out, but is one that has steadily been gaining ground as a weird headspace classic ever since. Quite what it is about could be anybody’s guess. It is filled with bizarre events that are delivered at a pitch of histrionic melodramatics. Variously:- Sam Neill tries to slash his wrists with an electric breadknife over his marriage breakup and then finds a perfected twin of Adjani in the schoolteacher Anna; she after about five minutes of wailing and vomiting in a subway tunnel gives birth to a tentacled monster which she spends the rest of the film fucking (it later turns into a twin of Neill). A pair of detectives with pink socks wander through the film. In the end Neill and Adjani’s son tries to drown himself in the bath, before everything ends in the flash of a nuclear detonation.

All of this bizarreness is considerably aided by director Andrzej Zulawski’s demented visual style. Zulawski seems only ever to be able to direct at a manically deranged pace or in vacuously dull meaningful pauses. The camera continuously wanders in and out of rooms in long tracking shots and there are weird disjointed lapses between shots. The streets, trains, cafes and bars of West Berlin (where the film was shot) seem to be completely empty of people. The film is lit in a washed-out blue light and the characters all painted in white-face - along with the hysterically shrieked performances of both Neill and Adjani the film seems more like kabuki theatre colliding with European art house cinema at its most willfully pretentious. Somehow in all of this Adjani was awarded the Palm D’Or for Best Actress Award at Cannes that year for the role. Certainly she should be celebrated for being able to attain an entire film at the histrionic pitch of a near-nervous breakdown - but is it a great performance ?

Zulawski feels like he has much he wants to say. Symbolism - The Berlin Wall representing divisions, everybody seeks perfected clone versions of the other - often looms as though he is pointing a big arrow at it. But what he is really trying to make a film about is not at all clear - marriage breakup ? an out-and-out horror film ? monsters from the Id ? There is so much going on that everything eventually collapses into symbolic overkill, not to mention total narrative incoherence. You can draw nominal similarities to David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) which featured a husband trying to rescue his estranged wife from a psychotherapeutic technique that allowed her to express herself by physically giving birth to monsters. Possession could almost be a subjective, internalized Brood - one that comes sans the explaining rationale of pschyotherapeutic techniques. Indeed Possession almost seems to inhabit the same kind of surreal interior territory as Polanski’s mental breakdown film Repulsion (1965) - it seems to be a subjective work from the inside of the emotional traumas of separation. But if that is what it is, Zulawski gives us no handholds. Everybody in the film seems totally nuts and it is never clear whose emotional trauma we are seeing - Neill’s or Adjani’s. That said there is definitely a small cult that regards this as a minor masterpiece. Even Sam Neill called this the favourite among his films.

The international version of the film runs to 127 minutes, the US distributor cut 45 minutes out and attempted to rearrange scenes in a vain attempt to provide greater clarity. It didn’t help. The original US cinematic release was promoted with free barf bags; in the UK the film was declared a video nasty and banned.

Ukranian-born, Polish-based director Zulawski has made a number of other films since, including The Silver Globe (1987), Boris Godunov (1989), My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (1989) and Fidelity (2000). Zulawksi’s one other venture into horror cinema has been The Devil (1988), a historical film set in 19th Century Poland that depicts the barbarism of the period with reportedly extremely graphic results.

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