Possession is a work that, decades later, retains its ability to assault the viewer, to claw at their psyche and never let go. If cinema is often a mirror of reality, Andrzej Żuławski's is a broken mirror, whose fragments reflect only anguish, hysteria, and metaphysical horror. Shot in 1981, at the height of the Cold War, the film is the most brutal and visceral autopsy ever performed on a marriage. Drawing on the pain of his own divorce, Żuławski stages an exorcism, a cell division so violent that it tears the fabric of reality itself, literally giving birth to monsters from a purulent bladder.

The setting is the first character, and perhaps the most important one. We are in West Berlin, but just a few meters from the Wall. It is not a city; it is an open wound, a non-place suspended between two ideologies, steeped in paranoia, espionage, and a palpable sense of the end of the world. Bruno Nuytten's camera (fluid, hyperkinetic, almost feverish) moves through bare apartments, gray streets, and subway stations that resemble circles of hell. The architecture of the Wall, with its guard towers and barbed wire, is the obvious objective correlative of the emotional prison in which the protagonists are locked up. This political schizophrenia, this literal division of the world, is the only stage on which the psychological and physical schizophrenia of the film can manifest itself.

The plot is deceptively simple: Mark (Sam Neill), a spy, returns home from a mission to find his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), wanting a divorce. Their love has evaporated, replaced by a hostility that borders on madness. The first half of the film is a Kammerspiel on amphetamines. It is a marital duel that rejects naturalism in favor of operatic hysteria. The characters don't talk, they scream. They don't argue, they convulse. Sam Neill, in a role that sees him oscillate between impotent rage and catatonic depression, throws himself against walls, self-mutilates (the electric knife scene), and sobs in a crescendo of masculine despair. He is a rational man (a spy) who dissolves upon contact with the irrational.

But if Neill is the earth that crumbles, Isabelle Adjani is the volcano that erupts. Her performance (which, incredibly, won her the Best Actress award at Cannes) is one of the most terrifying and courageous in the history of cinema. It is not acting; it is self-immolation. It is a physical exploration of psychotic collapse. Anna is possessed, not by a demon, but by an idea, by a need for liberation so absolute that she must destroy her old self. Her performance reaches its peak in what is perhaps the most unforgettable and shocking scene in the film: the “birth” in the subway underpass. It is an uninterrupted sequence shot in which Anna, laden with shopping bags that break (spilling milk and eggs, symbols of life and nourishment), has a convulsive seizure against the white tiled wall. It is an abortion, a birth, an orgasm, and a murder, all in one. It is the moment when her possession becomes physical, expelling and generating something non-human.

Possession shifts here from psychological drama to cosmic horror. Mark suspects a lover. He finds Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), a New Age guru in a dressing gown, the epitome of the intellectual and absurd lover, who preaches peace while being beaten. But their struggle is almost comical, a distraction. The private investigator hired by Mark discovers the truth: Anna has a second apartment. And in that apartment is the Other. There is the Lover. There is the “thing.” Designed by Carlo Rambaldi (the same as E.T.), the tentacled creature that Anna feeds, cares for, and has sex with is the black heart of the film. It is the ultimate metaphor: the “thing” that stands between a couple is not another human being, it is the embodiment of Anna's desire to create something new, a personal god, a being that loves her totally, outside of human conventions.

Żuławski further complicates this cosmology of pain by introducing the theme of the Doppelgänger. Mark meets Helen (again Adjani, but with green eyes and a serene demeanor), their son's teacher, who is the exact opposite of Anna: she is pure, sweet, domestic. She is the feminine ideal that Mark has lost. Meanwhile, the creature in the apartment, fed on blood and sex, begins its final metamorphosis, evolving to take on the appearance of Mark himself, but with Helen's green eyes. The film suggests that the only way for Mark and Anna to be “reborn” after the death of their love is to create perfect doubles, idealized and monstrous versions of themselves.

The final apocalypse, with the two Marks and the two Annas confronting each other while outside the city descends into chaos (sirens, helicopters, an explosion that seems atomic), is the logical conclusion to this symphony of destruction. The film is not a horror film about the supernatural; it is a horror film about codependency. It is an essay on how two people can love each other so much that they destroy each other in an attempt to separate, and how, in order to fill the void left by the other, they are willing to create monsters. Possession remains a unique work, a monolith of pure emotional terror, a film that doesn't just tell the story of a crisis, but forces the viewer to experience it in real time, leaving them exhausted, shaken, and irrevocably changed.