Review #255: Possession (1981)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #9 - Possession (1981)

It's been a long time since I've seen a movie that made less sense than this one.

I'll start off by trying to summarize the plot. As best as I can tell, Possession follows Mark, a spy (I think? It never plays into the story except to show that he works for the government) who's come home to his wife Anna and young son Bob after a long time away. He soon discovers Anna has been having an affair with a man named Heinrich, so Mark confronts Heinrich but gets beaten up. Anna begins acting increasingly bizarre and unhinged so Mark suspects she was cheating on him with more than just Heinrich, and some private investigation reveals she's been living with a... weird lovecraftian shapeshifting tentacle creature (?) whom I think she views as some sort of divine being. She kills a couple people, Mark has inexplicably become so obsessed with her that he covers up her crimes, but then he sees her having sex with this horrific creature and then he gets caught in a shootout with the cops. Wounded, he tries to escape, but Anna shows up with the creature, who has now turned into a copy of Mark for some reason. The cops kill both Anna and Mark for some reason, the Mark-creature starts climbing up on top of a door for some reason, and then the movie ends with a scene where the son Bob is at his teacher Helen's house for some reason (oh, and Helen looks identical to Anna for some reason), the Mark-creature shows up for some reason, Bob tells Helen not to answer the door for some reason, then Bob runs and seemingly drowns himself in the bathtub for some reason (and the tub was full for some reason) and then Helen stares at the camera for some reason while lights flash for some reason and we hear sounds of an air raid for some reason.

Just in case any of that made this film sound interesting, let me just curb that idea by saying, it isn't. This two-hour-long monstrosity fills its entire first hour with some of the most poorly-plotted, poorly-blocked scenes full of poorly-written dialogue that's poorly-acted by everyone involved. MANY scenes involve Mark and Hannah screaming at each other, hitting each other, throwing things, breaking things, and so on, but they happen pretty early on so you think maybe this is supposed to be how they act under duress. Unfortunately, that's just their baseline behavior. EVERY line, from EVERY character, is emoted in a way that doesn't make any sense given the scene. EVERY person acts un-like any real human would or should act. It's hard to take anybody in this movie seriously when NONE of them act believable.

One scene has Heinrich almost literally dancing around a hallway while having a tense conversation with Mark, and Mark doesn't act like anything is amiss. Another scene has Mark watching a home movie of Anna abusing a ballet student as if this recording is just something they would have. Another scene has Mark use a carving knife to cut his arm (after Anna does the same to her neck in a fit of rage) and then the wounds are never seen or mentioned again. Bob's teacher, Helen, inexplicably looks identical to Anna (she's played by the same actress), but this never comes into play in the story, nor is it ever addressed in dialogue. Mark and Helen even have an affair at one point (their second time meeting, as far as I can tell, she shows up at Mark's house and throws herself at him) and then this affair is never mentioned again. (It's also implied, in a very bizarre bit of sloppy editing, that Mark is also having an affair with Anna's friend Margit, but this is also never addressed in dialogue.) Near the middle of the film is a three-minute-long dialogue-free sequence of Anna stumbling around a train station grunting and writhing in one long unbroken shot, ending with her seemingly having a messy miscarriage. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of bizarre, nonsensical things the people do on-screen in Possession.

This movie is a MESS. Not just a mess, but a boring mess. None of the characters' actions make sense given their motivations in any given scene, I noticed plenty of poorly-edited errors that IMDB has tried convincing me were intentionally part of the narrative, and every scene's dialogue feels like it was written by someone with a poor understanding of English and handed off to actors who shot every scene out-of-order so they couldn't know how they were supposed to feel at the time. (Would you believe the director was going through a messy divorce when he made this film? I would!) The plot involving the lovecraftian horror Anna is sleeping with is... interesting, I guess, but altogether it comprises maybe five minutes of this two-hour-long beast. (And without it, there's no way to call this a horror film. I'm still not convinced horror is the right genre even with it.) So much of this movie is a collection of the most baffling, utterly baffling, filmmaking decisions I've ever seen in a film before, and every time I would check the clock to see how much more I had to sit through, the answer was "a lot more".

I do not recommend this movie in the slightest. Not since Werckmeister Harmonies have I seen a film that shows such a lack of respect for the viewer's time, while using up so much of it. Save yourself two hours and watch literally anything else.

Overall Rating: 1/10 Pink Socks That I Think Were Supposed To Be Significant But Maybe They Forgot To Include That Scene

IMDB Review Sensibility: As I expected, the vast majority of the IMDB reviews for this film are praising the film direction for its visionary metaphor blah blah blah. But IMDB user Continuumx provided this take, which I very much appreciate: "I got the impression that this was a deeply personal sort of film where the filmmaker was working through some very personal issues. In other words, the filmmaker made this mostly for himself. Unfortunately, I am not him and most of what he was doing here was lost on me. All of the characters are stark raving bonkers. Nothing they do or say make any sense. The dialogue is mostly a lot of artsy sounding nonsense. It probably means something to the filmmaker but it doesn't mean a damn thing to me. There are a lot of histrionics and overacting. A good chunk of the movie is taken up by the lead actress screaming and spazzing out. There's a monster or maybe there isn't? I don't know. It's hard to tell what is and isn't supposed to be metaphorical. Maybe all of it is."