Possession

Friday, October 29th at 8:30
Saturday, October 30th at 8:30

(France, West Germany / 1981 / Directed by Andrzej Żuławski)

Sam Neill plays Mark, a businessman and possible spy who returns to his home in West Berlin to find that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has fallen in love with someone else and is demanding a divorce. Almost immediately, he goes mad with hurt and fury, and the two lock into a desperate, hysterical, bloody clash. From there, things only get more intense, so when the film takes a turn into supernatural horror, the development feels oddly inevitable — as though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along.

Adjani won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance, but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking. With its pulsating score and writhing imagery, Possession commits to a cinematic delirium that’s intoxicating. Few movies convey so viscerally what it’s like to go mad, or to experience the twisted relationship between love and the desire to hold or control another person. This is not just a horror movie you take your friends to for a laugh or a shudder; this is what you watch with your ex and realize how much worse things could have been.

"There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. POSSESSION may be the only film in existence which is itself mad: unpredictable, horrific, its moments of terrifying lucidity only serving to highlight the staggering derangement at its core. Extreme but essential viewing." – Tom Huddleston, Time Out

R / 2 hrs 4 mins.
In English, French and German with subtitles.