45 Years Later, The World Has Inched Closer To the Surreal Dread Of Possession
When it was released, Possession was derided as a “video nasty.” Now, it closely reflects our absurd times.
Time heals all wounds, or in the case of movies, restores flops into favorites. The Thing, The Shining and Blade Runner left critics bewildered and, in some cases, disgusted upon its initial release but are now considered classics. When Andrzej Żuławski’s experimental horror film Possession premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1981, it too was met with controversy. Bizarre in premise and style, it was banned in the United Kingdom, labeled a “video nasty.”
As movie history would have it, the film, 45 years later, has turned the tables. The notoriously unsettling movie has amassed a loyal, ever-growing cult following. A new remake by Parker Finn with Robert Pattinson and Margaret Qualley threatens to tip the experimental horror movie further into the mainstream, if it isn’t already.
The time has come to see the method behind Żuławski’s madness. Behind the goopy gore and human-monster intercourse (more on that later), there’s a tender, timeless story about, well, breaking up. Żuławski wrote the movie about his own divorce. He came home to Warsaw to bring his wife and child back to France only to find his wife leaving him, which is essentially how Possession starts. Mark (Sam Neill) returns home to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants to live somewhere else with someone else (or rather something else). Critics now applaud the film for how it depicts the raw pains of a marriage coming undone, the agony of leaving someone you love, and the distress of not really understanding why.
But age also has also proved the movie’s much more prescient than first believed. While Żuławski set out to write a movie about divorce, he unwittingly also captured the surrealness of current times, mainly through the film’s absurd, incomprehensible and excessive style. There's nothing in the movie that “makes sense.” The premise rests on Mark finding out his wife is sleeping with an octopus monster. The octopus monster then becomes Mark. New Mark links up with New Anna (oh yeah, there's a doppelganger of her too)... Get it?
And then there’s the matter of the acting, which is equally as unrelentless and puzzling as the plot. Dialogue quickly oscillates between lengthy monologues to thrashing screams and spurts of words told through hyperventilation and jerky limbs. Adjani throws and convulses her body with such abandonment, often during quotidian conversations and errands, that one gets the sense that she is truly possessed. (Naturally she won Best Actress for this performance at Cannes in addition to her performance in Quartet by James Ivory.)
It’s precisely this balance of something so mundane as domestic disputes of “who will pick up our kid from school” coupled with this absurd style that creates a surreal sense of recognition. Watching it now in 2026 there’s something even more familiar in the way nothing makes sense and yet life goes on. While there may not be tentacled monsters and doppelgangers hiding in closets and walking around, there’s certainly a sense that the world no longer operates by logic and rationalism. Instead, academic Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and writer John Schoneboom describe a switch from reason to, what they call, Surrealpolitik. This is an era, says de Carvalho, in which “actions by global leaders produce a sense of strangeness and seem inconsistent with reason, moving beyond reality.”
In our era of surrealpolitik, politicians and presidents behave more like memes than people. Now, as in Possession, an onslaught of the excessive and nonsensical drowns the world in a feeling of unrealness. The film’s dogged embrace of the hyper-ludicrous rises to the occasion, or to put it in today’s latest absurd trend, moggs the era’s surreal-maxxing. Get it?
Isabelle Adjani gives one of cinema’s most unhinged, committed physical performances in Possession — one that would be tough to top.
Possession isn’t without its own political history, but this too feeds into Schoneboom’s definition of surrealpolitik as a hallucinatory web, fed by growing totalitarian and surveillance culture. The film was shot and set in West Berlin during the Cold War. This political tension haunts its characters. The Berlin Wall introduces the movie, where a shot of graffiti — “Die Mauer muss weg” or “the wall must go” — is shown before the opening credits. It stalks its characters, forming the backdrop of the couple’s apartment and Anna’s secret apartment. In between martial arguments, they look out the window and onto the wall. Soldiers peer back over through binoculars.
Living in this ever-surveilled world where a nuclear bomb might (literally or figuratively) go off at any moment, it’s not hard to imagine being driven to hysteria, to understand the urge to, like Anna, throw your groceries to the side and scream and rail against the train station walls.
The horror in watching Possession today is recognizing the madness in its characters, the ways the calamities of their fractured world shape paranoias, fear, and anxieties that bleed and break apart their relationships and their sense of reality. If Mickey 17 and One Battle After Another captured what is happening politically today, Possession shows us how it feels to live through it.
