Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.
Possession (1981) is one of cinema's most singular and harrowing works. Żuławski's screenplay operates simultaneously as visceral body horror, metaphysical nightmare, and raw dissection of marital collapse — a genuinely unique fusion that has no real peers. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill deliver performances of almost unhinged intensity that go far beyond conventional acting, with Adjani's subway scene among the most extraordinary pieces of screen acting ever committed to film. Bruno Nuytten's cinematography is restless, vertiginous, and expressionistically brilliant, perfectly matching the film's spiraling dread. The film's novelty is essentially unparalleled — it exists in a category of one, blending European art cinema with Cronenbergian body horror in a way never replicated. The ending, while thematically consistent with the film's apocalyptic logic, is somewhat opaque and abrupt in a way that slightly undercuts rather than crowns the experience, preventing a full 4 there.