Possession Review: Intense, grotesque, and a horror film masterpiece

A doppelganger is a kind of mirror. Literally, of course, that makes sense: The German compound word, first published in a novel from 1796, combines the terms for “double” and “walker”, indicating that someone is out and about in the world. But figuratively, just as a mirror has the ability to both reflect and distort, so does the doppelganger – who is neither a twin nor a clone. The existence of someone who looks like you but is not you hits a deeper, deeper level, and the concept has terrified people for centuries. First as a literary medium, as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The lookalike and Robert Louis Stevensons Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – and since it has jumped onto the screen, as the usual horror trope.

As a myth and folklore figure, the doppelganger has been hovering in our nightmares for some time and its prevalence raises questions for ourselves. Are we really unique, unique, or autonomous when someone we don’t know but who has our same face lives at the same time as us? Our individual identities are theoretically the only things we really own; we are born with them and we die with them. And yet the presence of another person with the same physicality is – as Sigmund Freud described in his culture-shaking essay from 1919 – “uncanny”. Is the double a manifestation of our suppression of fear? Is it a way for us to cheat death? Or is actually a doppelganger make it true our death by implying that a part of us that we cannot control will continue to live after we are gone?

Horror loves Freud’s latter suggestion, and the genre has been particularly creative in its ideas about the doppelganger figure. Like film critic and scientist Steven Schneider in his 2001 Film and philosophy Article “Manifestations of the literary double in modern horror cinema” has not only invented physical copies (“murderous alter egos, monstrous shapeshifters, manic twins or malevolent clones”), but also “mental doppelgangers”, which Schneider categorized as “schizen, shapeshifter.” , Projections and Psychos ”. Whether the doppelganger manifests as an imitation of the body or the brain, few things are more frightening than knowing and simultaneously not knowing of yourself.

All of this is to say that the horror doppelganger – who often pit an individual against an unknowable, mysterious, supernatural, or otherworldly being – is unique in that it turns our enemies into versions of ourselves. With this trope, which was born in the early 20th

Both the original version by Walter Wanger from 1956 Invasion of the body eater and Steven Spielberg’s 1978 remake combine horror and science fiction to create “Pod People” – emotionless, empty and just like us in appearance. All three versions of The thing (the original from 1951) The thing from another world, the classic from 1982 with practical effects by John Carpenter and the prequel from 2011, which is not entirely different enough) depict an extraterrestrial being who can imitate, mutate and use our physiology in a purely utilitarian, completely unsentimental way. The Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch) add to the subgenre with films like. a disturbingly surreal note The breed, Abandoned highway, and Mulholland Drive, who reiterated Freud’s theories that emotional devastation and trauma are key to the uncanny. And more recently, Natalie Portman has doubled in with doppelgangers Black Swan and destruction, while Jordan Peele (who conjured up a creepy suburban classic) The Stepford wives in his first directorial work Exit) once again disturbed pleasant neighborhoods with his killing Tethered in US.

What it means to be human and how we know if someone is or not becomes the predominant question of many of these hybrid offerings – and perhaps no film has been as relentlessly gross in exploring the concept as possession. Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film, initially vilified, later admired, and currently receiving 4K restoration and nationwide re-release, is as inconvenient as it is brilliant.

Watch out possession feels like sitting next to a couple in the middle of a fight in a restaurant trying not to overhear while they blame each other over starters, smoke silently through starters, cry apologizing over dessert and finally going separately, maybe going back to different lovers when the ordeal is over. It doesn’t look like horror at first glance, but Żuławski is a master at creating tension and gradually introducing details that add up to a larger, more agonizing whole. The result is that possession is incredibly performative and unsettlingly intimate at the same time, and its horrors come not only from a character named The Creature, but also from the realization that sometimes the person you love most in the world doesn’t pay any attention to you at all.

This duality of brutality and fragility runs through every frame of possessionwritten by Żuławski and Frederic Tuten while the former was in the middle of divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek. (She starred in his previous films, different kind of horror The third part of the night and The devil.) In possessionHis married couple Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) live in the same apartment in West Berlin, but are no longer the same lovers as they used to be. “Maybe all couples go through that,” she wonders as they lie in bed together, but this dead end doesn’t feel surmountable. It feels like the end.

The controlling, obsessive Mark, whom Neill plays with a rumbling, bombastic energy that eventually gives way to shock and sensual cunning, refuses to give up the relationship. He’ll do anything to get Anna back – confront her lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), hire a PI (Carl During) to chase her – but then something strange happens. Mark meets the teacher of her son Bob (Michael Hogben) Helen (also played by Adjani), who looks exactly like Anna, but with bright green eyes. And then something else strange: Anna is hiding a secret apartment in a rundown building in a rundown part of town, a place where you disappear. Who or what does she meet there?

Thanks to a range of cross-border horrors ranging from Lovecraftian (the creature mentioned above) to disturbing earthly (domestic violence, self-harm, and miscarriage), possession was heavily edited down for the first US release and banned in the UK The sharp graphics and vivid shades of this 4K restoration are a revelation. Each scene is emotionally overwhelmed and complements the movie’s obsession with inexplicable extremes. Adjani’s and Neill’s appearances are grueling physical, including the infamous subway scene that solidifies Adjani’s work here as one of horror’s greatest hysterical women. The movie’s focus on the insane effects of constructing a doppelganger (so many dismembered limbs!) possession so unique in its approach to this trope.

What does it take to make another person, especially another person who is a copy of someone else? What are the mental and physical consequences of this? Is the desire to spend your life with a better version of a loved one a compassionate desire or an insane desire? Since then, other films in the doppelganger form have followed possessionbut they all operate in the shadow of this film’s gritty, gritty, grotesque legacy, which suggests that making a doppelganger is as destructive of exploitation as a failed marriage. Many horror films have explored the intrusion into reality that a doppelganger offers, but few have done so with as much blood, sweat, and body fluids as the unshakably disturbing one possession.

possession plays in cinemas nationwide and will be streamed exclusively on Metrograph.com until October 31st.