- Next story I Do Movies Badly: Introduction to Christmas Horror (featuring Alonso Duralde)
- Previous story I Do Movies Badly: House
SUBSCRIBE
ADVERTISEMENTS
More
In the pantheon of IDMB movies that have befuddled me, there’s Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle, and now, there’s Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession.
Tags: andrzej zulawskibattleship pretensionbpdramafilmfilmshorrori do movies badlyisabelle adjanijim rohnermargit carstensenmoviemoviespodcastpossessionsam neill
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
More
Possession is perhaps my favorite horror film, and really served as my gateway to the artier sorts of horror (although I can’t remember if it was the dream sequences in Excision which led me to it or the other way around), resulting in it becoming my favorite genre. I don’t understand Mark’s job, or the purpose socks, or the possible apocalypse(?) at the end, but for me that doesn’t prevent the film from being enjoyable. It’s not like Marienbad where I get nothing at all from the film, and I didn’t experience it as a Haneke-esque provocation of the audience. Zulawski isn’t smirking while he makes this as a provocation, he made it for personal reasons but (in my view, and that of the many fans you reference) he transformed that into a form others could enjoy. Zulawski presumably felt blindsided by the dissolution of his marriage, and Mark similarly finds it incomprehensible. Since he’s a secret agent rather than a director and one can assume the real Zulawski wouldn’t be willing to go to such extremes, there’s a rather different result, and that works for movies because we want to see extreme situations. What I like about horror is that directors can go places and do things that wouldn’t be permitted in other genres, and this is really a prime example. The subway sequence with Isabelle Adjani alone is stupendous, really one of my favorite scenes ever filmed. As with Mark using a rocking chair with such intensity that he keeps going in and out of the frame, this would be considered “too much” in a drama aiming at realism, but in an expressionist artwork like “The Scream” such extremity can work perfectly well.