Watched on Blu-Ray

This bastard of David Cronenberg and Ingmar Bergman is one of the most fascinating European films of the 80s. It is one of the few films that was simultaneously nominated for the Palme d'Or in Cannes and ended up on the "video nasty" banned list in England (1981-1999). It is both an art film and a shocker. Desolate and poetic in one. Enigmatic and superficial in the same breath. In his first and last English-language film, the Pole Andrzej Żuławski dealt with his divorce from his wife, the actress Małgorzata Braunek. And he was not exactly subtle about it. The wife, energetically played to the limit of pain by Isabelle Adjani, is a bipolar monster here, constantly screaming, constantly demanding, constantly accusing - but never even remotely enlightening. What does she have? What does she want? It remains, as it does for many men, a mystery.

Adjani's play may be an exercise in endurance in its excess, but it perfectly represents Żuławski's handling of the subject of divorce. Like Bergman, he dissects the relationship mercilessly - but he takes leave of realism and switches to the grotesquely exaggerated. Dislike becomes hatred, quarrelling becomes shouting, conflict becomes horror. Perhaps just as Żuławski sees his divorce in retrospect, as a painful cutting of the cord between two symbionts, almost like cold turkey (Sam Neill once lies sweating like a junkie in a hotel bed). This loses all naturalism so quickly that one is quite challenged as a viewer. But in return, one immediately adjusts to this tone and follows Żuławski.

Where to? Żuławski plays with various things. For example, the good-evil scheme when Adjani plays two roles at once: the hysterical wife in blue and the angelic teacher in white. He plays with religious motifs such as the sound of bells, prayer and crosses. And he ventures into horror when all the previously purely human shock elements manifest themselves in creatures from the creative mind of "E.T." creator Carlo Rambaldi. It is the complete externalisation, i.e. the logical consequence of the play, which has been turned completely inside out anyway. In a film where nothing is subtle, it should also come as no surprise that a monster suddenly enters the picture. The monster is there from minute one, in the minds of the protagonists.

When it becomes visible, it is the spawn of Adjani's fears and fantasies: an undead thing full of phallic tentacles, born of herself and now her incestuous lover. A fascinating creature from the world of horror in the context of an arthouse film. Like everything in the film, it can be interpreted in many ways. Sexual readings suggest themselves, a gender study. But also political interpretation, when Mark's house is close to the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the separation of East and West, a violent divorce of worlds that created a communist monster in the East. But even better, you can feel the film. "Possession" allows for many readings, and yet it is somehow simplistic: the incarnation of a traumatic process. Philosophy and politics sinking into blood and slime.

In Żuławski's hands, this becomes a hauntingly hypnotic trip full of terrifying images and frightening excesses. The camera never stands still, the actors never come to rest, the music squeals and stutters its way forward, Berlin becomes a nightmarish backdrop for a surveillance and control state. Everything is suppressed here, everything wants to burst out, to ooze out. Even a ballet lesson resembles rape, a birth degenerates into a disgusting frenzy. This is certainly not for the mass audience. But also only to a limited extent for art audiences. Exactly this in-between-the-chairs cinema is much too rare nowadays. Cinema that uncompromisingly serves up its vision, however repulsive it may be. Cinema that draws from the fullest.