Mark (Sam Neill) is a spy in Berlin, returning home to his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and young son Bob (Michael Hogben). Mark and Anna are on the verge of breaking up, Anna is having an affair and Mark is having none of it. As the pair dance around each other with increasing violence, the true nature of Anna’s new love becomes clear and it’s unlike anything else on Earth.

Reissued by Second Sight, Possession is an astonishing, confounding piece of cinema. Directed by Andrzej Żuławski, the movie is empty in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of pandemic cinema. Anna and Mark rattle around a largely abandoned Berlin, people appearing with the same increasingly staccato pace that the movie is cut with. Mark is observed, constantly, from the other side of the Berlin Wall. We never actually find out who he’s working for and the superiors we meet seem rather more clued in on his situation than we are. A memorable early scene has Mark and Anna sit at 90 degrees to one another, bickering in a mirrored, largely abandoned restaurant. Their apartment is a clinical white showroom full of high end consumer goods they use to hurt themselves in a particular horrible scene. Anna’s ‘other’ apartment is a decrepit studio full of filth, blood and something unspeakable. It’s visceral, in every sense, alive in the way nothing else is and that makes it even more alien.

Possession is profoundly, relentlessly unsettling because it gives us just enough to understand how much danger everyone is in. It’s given an extra level by the passage of time, Neill’s well-liked gentle modern screen persona sliced away and replaced with his earlier, hungrier horror icon self. He purrs the line ‘bleed a while’ the way whiskey pours over ice and veers wildly from comedy to brutality to kitchen sink abuser. Heinz Bennent, playing Claire’s lover Heinrich is his frequent sparring partner, often literally. The pair shift from exhausted, furious mundanity to Bennent chewing and digesting the scenery to a fight scene that shifts from emotional to brutal to comedic to oddly tender. Men adrift in a drifting city caught in the current of something they can’t understand.

But Isabelle Adjani owes every second of this movie, made doubly impressive by the fact she’s never alone on screen aside from one, pivotal, awful scene. Vibrating with tension, rage, revulsion, lust, grief and terror she’s impossible to look away from even as you desperately wish to. There’s a fourth wall break here, as Mark watches footage of Anna teach a dance class and she, somehow, sees him and speaks to him which is one of the most unsettling scenes I’ve ever encountered. That Adjani solo moment is orders of magnitude worse, in the best of ways. It starts with her walking, alone, through a deserted subway and laughing. It finishes with her covered in groceries and more than one bodily fluid, screaming in pain, ecstasy or both. It’s a scene that defies description in a movie that demands attention if you can stay the course.

This is a Second Sight disc so the extras are top notch too, with four commentaries and a series of video essays and documentaries. I especially liked Kat Ellinger’s ‘The Shadow We Carry’, looking at the movie as an example of modern melodrama and the unique, mercurial perspective it brings to its characters.

Verdict: Possession is relentless. it’s one of the most unsettling, disturbing horror movies ever made and if you’re an abuse survivor of any form, especially from a family member, then this is not ground you may wish to tread. If you do, go carefully. Regardless, anyone watching this should be ready for one of the most confident, disturbing and unique horror movies ever made. A classic in every sense, and one given the attention it long deserved in this excellent reissue.10/10

Alasdair Stuart