Possession (1981) — the year a marriage and a country burned down at once

In 1981, Andrzej Zulawski shot a horror film in West Berlin about a marriage falling apart. The city was divided. The Wall was visible from the production. Zulawski himself was freshly expelled from Poland — the Communist authorities had shut down his previous film, On the Silver Globe, mid-production in 1977, destroying the sets, confiscating the footage. He arrived in Berlin with a collapsed country in his past, a collapsing marriage in his present, and the peculiar clarity that people sometimes find when everything else has been taken away.

The result was Possession — a film that Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for, that the British Board of Film Classification banned on video under the Video Recordings Act, that disappeared for twenty years from legitimate circulation in the English-speaking world, and that has been rediscovered twice since: once in the mid-2000s, once when Metrograph Pictures and then Criterion mounted restorations that brought it to a new generation in the 2010s and 2020s.

What the film is actually about

The surface story is this: Mark (Sam Neill), a spy, returns home to West Berlin to find his wife Anna (Adjani) in distress. The marriage ends. Anna disappears increasingly into a relationship she refuses to explain. Mark finds out she has taken a lover. The lover, when he tracks him down, is a creature — something organic and inhuman that she has been tending in an apartment across the city.

The film is not coherently symbolic in the way that a thesis on it might suggest. Zulawski has said that he did not plan a Cold War allegory; he was making a film about the end of his marriage, and the geography of West Berlin — a city surrounded by hostile territory, a city that existed under the pressure of its own improbability — was simply the landscape available to him. But the landscape is not inert. The Wall appears behind scenes. The checkpoints, the guards, the American military presence in the background of ordinary street scenes: the film's domestic catastrophe is staged inside a place where political catastrophe has become ambient. The two modes of falling apart are, by proximity, connected.

The metro-station scene

Adjani's scene in the Zoologischer Garten U-Bahn station — in which Anna, alone in a corridor between platforms, experiences something that is not quite a seizure, not quite a miscarriage, not quite a possession, but borrows from all of these — is the scene the film is known for. It runs approximately four minutes. Adjani was reportedly so depleted by filming it that she required a period of recovery. Zulawski, by most accounts, shot it in several takes, pushing her toward the edge of what she had said she was willing to do.

The scene is hard to describe because its content is not exactly visual — or rather, it is visual in a way that resists summary. Adjani throws herself against the walls of the corridor. She writhes on the floor. There is blood and milk. The sound design is discordant and high. The camera moves around her without cutting, holding the space and holding her inside it. It is one of the most extreme pieces of film acting of the 1980s, and it was delivered in a U-Bahn corridor at night, in a divided city, by a French actress who was thirty years old and who said afterward that she nearly did not survive making the film.

The Video Nasty years and the missing decades

When Possession arrived on UK home video in 1982 it was listed under the Video Recordings Act as a "video nasty" — one of seventy-two films that the Director of Public Prosecutions identified for potential prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. The designation was chaotic (the list included Possession alongside The Driller Killer and Cannibal Ferox, films with very different artistic intentions) but its effect was total. The film could not be sold, rented, or screened commercially in the UK for years.

In the United States the situation was less acute but similar in outcome: a heavily cut version circulated on VHS, removing approximately forty minutes, which made the film incoherent. The cut was not authorized by Zulawski. Most American viewers who encountered Possession in the 1980s and 1990s saw this mutilated version and drew reasonable conclusions about its quality from what they saw. The conclusions were wrong.

The BFI gave the film a full certificate in 1999. The BFI catalog entry for the film describes it as "one of the most extreme horror films of its era," which is accurate but undersells what the extreme is in service of. Criterion released the uncut restoration in 2023, with a new 4K scan of the original negative and an essay by Kier-La Janisse.

The Cold War subtext nobody talks about

The reading that persists in academic film writing — and that Zulawski himself has neither endorsed nor entirely denied — is that the creature Anna tends in the apartment is a figure for the Eastern Bloc, or for totalitarianism, or for the political unconscious of Europe in 1981. The film was made the year that Solidarity was suppressed in Poland, the year before the imposition of martial law. Zulawski was a Polish filmmaker in exile watching his country disappear into martial rule from a city that was itself a symptom of a political division that had never resolved.

The reading does not need to be the only one. Possession works as a film about a marriage, as a film about female rage, as a horror film about a literal creature. The Cold War context enriches it rather than explaining it. The film's most honest register is probably its most irrational one: the U-Bahn scene, the creature apartment, the film's final images, which are apocalyptic in a literal sense and which do not map cleanly onto any interpretive framework. Sight & Sound's retrospective describes this quality as "a horror film organized around a specifically political grief."

Where it sits now

The Criterion restoration is the version to watch. The uncut film is a different film from the cut one: coherent, formally deliberate, and devastating in its last thirty minutes in a way that requires the film's full runtime to earn. Adjani's performance is the kind of thing that, once seen, is difficult to set aside. Neill, who does most of his work in a more controlled register, provides the film's stability — and his stability is part of what makes her unraveling so effective.

Possession belongs in conversation with the forgotten 80s horror films this site tracks, and it connects directly to the Polish horror lineage discussed in our survey of Polish horror. The film is not comfortable. It is not meant to be. It is the record of a year when several things burned down at once, in a city that had been burning slowly for decades. The dread collection on this site has a number of films that traffic in a similar register — but Possession is the one from which most of the others descend.

Sources & further reading

• Criterion Collection — Possession release page (2023 restoration)
• BFI — Possession catalog entry
• Sight & Sound — retrospective essay on Possession
• Janisse, Kier-La. House of Psychotic Women (FAB Press, 2012) — extended chapter on Adjani's performance and the film's feminist reception.