Possession Review: Intense, Grotesque, Horror Movie Masterpiece


A doppelgänger is a kind of mirror. Literally, of course it makes sense: the German compound word, first published in a novel from 1796, combines the terms for “double” and “walker”, suggesting that someone is a duplicate in the world. But figuratively speaking, just as a mirror has the ability to reflect and distort, so does the doppelgänger, who is neither twin nor clone. The existence of someone who looks like you, but is not, affects on a deeper and more visceral level, and the concept has been scaring people for centuries. First as a literary device, as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s book The double and Robert Louis Stevenson Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde – and ever since it hit the big screen, like a common horror trope.

As a figure of myth and folklore, the doppelgänger has been floating in our nightmares for a while, and its prevalence raises questions about ourselves. Are we really unique, singular or autonomous if someone whom we do not know, but who has our same face, is alive at the same time as us? Our individual identities are theoretically the only things we really possess; we are born with them and we die with them. And yet the presence of another person with the same physique is … as Sigmund Freud described in his 1919 essay that shocks culture: “amazing.” Is the double a manifestation of our repression of fear? Is it a way to cheat death? Or a doppelgänger actually make reality our death by suggesting that a part of us that we cannot control will live after we leave?

See also  WoW: Patch 9.2 - All information about the content: Raid, tier sets, release

Horror loves Freud’s latest suggestion, and the genre has been particularly creative in its imaginations of the doppelgänger figure. As film critic and scholar Steven Schneider wrote in his 2001 Cinema and Philosophy In the article “Manifestations of the literary double in modern horror cinema”, the genre has invented not only physical copies (“murderous alter egos, monstrous shapeshifters, maniac twins or malevolent clones”) but also “mental doubles”, which Schneider classifies like “schizos, shapeshifters, projections, and psychopaths.” Whether the doppelgänger manifests as an imitation of the body or the brain, few things are more scary than knowledge and not knowing of yourself.

All of this is to say that in horror, which often pits an individual against an unknowable, mysterious, supernatural, or otherworldly entity, the doppelgänger is unique in that it turns our enemies into versions of ourselves. With this trope established in the early 20th century, horror loosely overlapped with other genres that ground doppelgänger on established realism, resulting in films that are equally introspective and outward-focused.

Both Walter Wanger’s original 1956 version of Invasion of the body thieves and Steven Spielberg’s 1978 remake combine horror with science fiction to create “pod people”: emotionless, empty, and exactly like us in appearance. The three versions of The thing (the original from 1951 The thing from another world, John Carpenter’s 1982 practical effects classic, and 2011’s not-enough-different prequel) feature an alien entity that can mimic, mutate, and use our physiology in a purely utilitarian and totally unsentimental way. The Davids (Cronenbergs and Lynch) put an eerily surreal twist on the subgenre with movies like Progeny, Lost highway, and Mulholland Drive, which reiterated Freud’s theories about how emotional devastation and trauma are key to the sinister. And more recently, Natalie Portman messed with doppelgängers twice in Black Swan and Annihilation, while Jordan Peele (who evoked the creepy suburban classic The Stepford Wives in his first endeavor as a director Salt) disrupted pleasant neighborhoods once more with his happy Tethered slaughter in Us.

A man holds the head of a woman who looks scared

Image: Metrograph Images

What it means to be human, and how do we know whether or not someone is, becomes the overriding question of many of these hybrid offerings, and perhaps no movie has been so relentlessly rude in its exploration of this concept as Possession. Initially maligned, later admired, and currently the recipient of a 4K restoration and nationwide reissue, Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film is as awkward as it is brilliant.

Looking Possession it feels like sitting in a restaurant next to a couple in the middle of a fight and trying not to eavesdrop as accusations are thrown loudly during appetizers, they silently smoke through main courses, apologize through tears as they share a dessert and finally go separately, perhaps going back to different lovers, when the ordeal is over. It doesn’t seem like horror at first, but Żuławski is a master at creating tension and gradually introducing details that add up to a grander, more agonizing whole. The result is that Possession It’s both incredibly performative and hauntingly intimate, and its horrors come not just from a character called The Creature, but also from the realization that sometimes the person you love the most in the world may not care about you at all.

That duality of brutality and fragility runs through each painting of Possession, which was written by Żuławski and Frederic Tuten while the former was in the middle of a divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek. (She starred in his previous movies, Another Kind of Horrors The third part of the night and The devil.) On Possession, married couple Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) occupy the same apartment in West Berlin, but they are no longer the same loving couple they once were. “Maybe all couples go through this,” he wonders as they lie in bed together, but this dead end does not seem to be overcome. It feels like the end.

Controlling and obsessive Mark, whom Neill plays with bombastic, boastful energy that eventually gives way to jolt shock and sensual cunning, refuses to let go of the relationship. She will do anything to get Anna back – confront her lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), hire a private investigator (Carl Duering) to follow her – but then something strange happens. Mark meets his son Bob’s (Michael Hogben) teacher, Helen (also played by Adjani), who looks like Anna, but with lime green eyes. And then something weirder: Anna hides a secret apartment in an abandoned building in a dilapidated part of town, the kind of place you go to disappear. Who or what will you meet there?

Thanks to a variety of horrors that cut across boundaries ranging from Lovecraftian (the aforementioned creature) to the more terrifyingly earthly (domestic violence, self-harm, and miscarriage), Possession was heavily edited for its initial US release and banned in the UK. The sharp images and vibrant tones of this 4K restoration are a revelation. Each scene is emotionally overloaded, complementing the film’s obsession with inexplicable extremes. Adjani and Neill’s performances are strenuously physical, including the infamous subway scene that solidifies Adjani’s work here as one of the greatest hysterical horror women of all time. The film’s focus on the insane-inducing effects of designing a doppelgänger (so many dismembered limbs!) Is what it does. Possession so unique in his approach to this trope.

What does it mean to create another person, especially another person who is a copy of another? What are the spiritual and physical costs of that? Is wishing to spend life with a better version of someone you love an empathic or delusional wish? Other films have followed in the doppelgänger mold since PossessionBut they all operate in the shadow of this film’s bleak, grim, and grotesque legacy, which suggests that making a stunt double is as destructive an act of exploitation as a failed marriage. Many horror films have explored the transgression of reality that a doppelgänger provides, but few have done so with as much blood, sweat, and bodily fluids as the unshakable derangement. Possession.

Possession it is screened in theaters nationwide and airs exclusively on Metrograph.com through October 31.


www.polygon.com