There are subtle films, there are unsubtle films and then there's 'Possession (1981)', a picture that cranks everything up to eleven and doesn't even think about adjusting the dials until its end credits have rolled. It's a very violent movie, and I'm not just talking about violence in the traditional sense. Every movement feels like a convulsion, every reaction an explosion, every interaction a fight, every line of dialogue a visceral scream. Of course, there are also moments of more conventional conflict, eruptions of painful brutality that hit like a truck, but the piece is very aggressive for its entire duration. It's nihilistic, but not unreasonably nasty. Its characters tear themselves apart from the inside as they fruitlessly scramble to understand their seemingly world-shattering situation. The performances are overwrought yet vigorous, some of the most intense I've ever seen on screen. They walk the line between scary and silly, ultimately emerging as rather uncanny. As such, they're rather unsettling. They're over-the-top without being obnoxious, forceful without being foolish, pretty much pitch-perfect for what the movie tries to achieve. Everything is just a bit off, representative of a kind of unreality that roots the story in a world adjacent to our own, recognisable yet alien. The tone is effectively bizarre, as is the film in general. There's nothing quite like it, to be honest. It certainly has a distinct effect. The actual plot is strangely discreet considering how brazenly unsubtle the overall experience is. The movie is, at its core, a metaphor for divorce. The specifics of how this metaphor relates to the beat-for-beat plot are almost irrelevant. In a way, the film's subtext is its substance. Without its allegorical underpinning, I suppose it doesn't really hold any weight. This is almost the opposite of how most movies with an allegorical element operate, as they tend to present an air-tight straightforward story that can also be interpreted in a few different ways. Here, those interpretations are pretty much the only thing that matter. Most of the movie is a literal manifestation of the metaphors it represents; there's almost no other way to interpret its events. Perhaps that could be frustrating to some, especially because its in-the-moment narrative is purposefully difficult to parse. Yet, it's a picture that you're meant to feel more than understand. It makes sure that you feel every visceral moment. In that sense, it's a total success. It's oddly engrossing, an energetic and bracing experience that takes no prisoners. It's bizarrely entertaining in its own way. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and all the better for it. 7/10.

Surely other Zulawski movies like "La femme publique" and "L'important c'est d'aimer" have dark, disturbing moments, too, but "Possession" must be the most terrifying of them all. It all begins perfectly normal, like something that could happen every day, anywhere in your neighborhood: Anna (Adjani) leaves Mark (Sam Neill),she confesses she found a new lover already a year ago, and then the breaking up of their marriage naturally affects their little son, too. "I'm the maker of my own evil", Anna says once, and the evil she creates is visualized literally as a slimy demon, whereas Mark "creates" a school teacher looking exactly like Anna (and also played by Adjani),a woman so pure and innocent they go to bed together without having sex, and of course the idealized woman immediately takes care of his son ... and the dish washing ;-). The torment and hysteria of destroyed love is perfectly set in a Berlin before reunification, with the wall appearing countless times in the frame: an obvious symbol that divides what used to belong together, just like the characters in the movie. The "possessed" Adjani delivers an unforgettable performance, but if you are going to watch this, be prepared for more blood and guts than in "The Exorcist".

It's staggering to come up against a filmmaker who has a truly mad vision to put onto celluloid. If it's really believable and the maker isn't just putting on the audience it can take us into that madness. Possession is a film that is like it's title, taken with it's own sense of grandeur, starting off as a Scenes-from-a-Marriage-esque tale of downfall - with more ZAP and wildness in the fights the married couple have - but with something just not quite right. These scenes feel raw and uninhibited, by the actors and by the material, which goes to such extremes of how much they hurt one another that it becomes perversely funny.

Why all the camera movement in this film, especially early on, where it turns into Vittorio Storaro Time with a Red Bull chaser? From the sensibility of the high emotions and hysteria on display, why not? If your material is going all out, then you might as well go all out with it. Isabelle Adjani really, REALLY goes to town here, forgetting that there's such a thing as 'chewing scenery' and just stampeding through it at times, with Sam Neill and the camera operator being breathless to keep up. It's a film that moves with real force and energy... sometimes maybe TOO much force and energy.

For a film like possession, excess is not something that can be kept back, but what is so fascinating is that it's so intense at times, in the husband/wife interactions, the emotional violence springing out into physical abuse (at one point a slap is then encouraged into more, an uncomfortable scene done just right),that it's fascinating because it's going into such high volume. And as a horror film, a true horror film of the soul where it's laid bare and stripped out by a demon and f***ed with a spiky tail or something, it's bewildering, mind-boggling, and a dark pile of fun.

A lot of it is the performances - Adjani worked her ass off to get that Cannes best actress win, and though there are times I can't understand her (not sure if it's the accent or the lines, like her 'fate and chance' monologue) and runs the gamut as a character who starts out flawed and damaged and gets so turned-inside-out she makes Linda Blair in the Exorcist look like a... girl. And Sam Neill has a kind of strange appeal here - at times he talks like he doesn't take these lines seriously, or is doing so SO much that it just becomes funny, and other times he is genuinely power-punching with his dramatic touch. In a scene like the restaurant fight he goes between both levels.

But why I may, someday, after I can get over the experience, would return to Possession is that among the f***ing-insane style of films out there, there's nothing else quite like it. It revels in bringing the audience into its horror set-pieces, especially with that creature in the apartment as ambiguous a demon as the baby in Eraserhead, and the dread in every man going into that apartment harder to bear than the one before. And there is genuine pain, I think, in the filmmaking. I don't know the history behind the film's gestation but I'd wager the director had a bad marriage and expressed it, literally and metaphorically, with a tale of an unfaithful woman brought to madness by a demon... or maybe that's it.

Possession doesn't spoon-feed at any point in time. On the contrary, and maybe this is a flaw I think, there's so little explanation of anything in the film that by the last fifteen minutes as Sam Neill's character goes ape-s**t and the husband/wife's child just gives up. It got to the point where I had my hands up in a 'what the hell!?' position sitting in my seat in the theater. Perhaps another viewing would solve some of my quandaries, or just make new ones. Whatever the case, the mood of this film is chilling and harrowing, and for those who like their dolly shots, this is a must-must-MUST see. Oh, and by the way, the creature effects - by the guy that did E.T.(!)