Possession · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Possession runs on affection-image at maximum voltage — Isabelle Adjani's face and thrashing body become the film's true subject, the place where Żuławski locates the unbearable weight of marital dissolution. The film's most devastating passage, in which Anna convulses and haemorrhages in a Berlin underpass, refuses any psychological explanation the plot might offer; it is pure feeling made flesh, affect so concentrated it ruptures the skin of realism and spills into body horror. That extremity is housed in any-space-whatever: Bruno Nuytten's wide-angle lenses warp the couple's West Berlin apartment into a pressurized box, and the city's Cold War corridors — all chilly blues and greens, underpopulated municipal grey — drain location of habitation until every room feels provisional, a nowhere that amplifies rather than shelters. The investigation Mark mounts belongs to a thriller, but the thriller dissolves around him; what supplants it is crystal-image, the actual and virtual rendered indiscernible through Anna's doppelgänger. Żuławski draws here on the face-merging grammar of Bergman's Persona — his explicit ancestor for the doubling device — reworking Bergman's modernist two-women fusion into something more ontologically violent: Adjani plays both wife and idealized double until the line between the woman Mark loved and the creature she has gestated ceases to exist. The horror the film finally delivers is epistemological: not that the monster is real, but that the marriage may always have contained it.