Possession review: Intense, grotesque, and a horror movie masterpiece

A doppelgänger is a kind of mirror. Literally, of course that makes sense: The German compound word, first published in a 1796 novel, combines the terms for “double” and “walker,” suggesting someone’s duplicate out and about in the world. But figuratively, just as a mirror has the ability to both reflect and distort, so does the doppelgänger — who is neither a twin, nor a clone. The existence of someone who looks like you but isn’t you hits on a deeper, more visceral level, and the concept has been spooking people for centuries. First as a literary device, as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Double and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case between Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde — and since it jumped to the silver screen, as a common horror trope.

As a figure of myth and folklore, the doppelgänger has been floating around our nightmares for a while, and its prevalence raises questions about ourselves. Are we really unique, singular, or autonomous if someone whom we don’t know, but who has our same face, is alive at the same time we are? Our individual identities are theoretically the only things we truly own; we’re born with them, and we die with them. And yet the presence of another person with that same physicality is — as Sigmund Freud described in his culture-shaking 1919 essay — “uncanny.” Is the double a manifestation of our repression of fear? It is a means for us to escape death. Or does a doppelgänger actually Realize your potential our death by suggesting that a part of us which we cannot control will live on after we’re gone?

Horror loves Freud’s latter suggestion, and the genre has been particularly creative in its imaginings of the doppelgänger figure. Steven Schneider was a scholar and film critic. Film and Philosophy article “Manifestations of the Literary Double in Modern Horror Cinema,” the genre has invented not just physical copies (“murderous alter egos, monstrous shape-shifters, maniacal twins, or malevolent clones”) but also “mental doubles,” which Schneider categorizes as “schizos, shape-shifters, projections, and psychos.” Whether the doppelgänger manifests as a mimicry of the body or brain, few things are scarier than the simultaneous knowing and Not knowingTake care of you.

All of this is to say that in horror — which often pits an individual against an unknowable, mysterious, supernatural, or otherworldly entity — the doppelgänger is unique in that it makes our enemies versions of ourselves. With this trope established in the early 20th century, horror has freely overlapped with other genres that ground the doppelgänger in established realism, resulting in films that are equally inward-gazing and outwardly focused.

Both Walter Wanger’s 1956 original version of The Invasion by the Body Snatchers and Steven Spielberg’s 1978 remake combine horror with sci-fi to create “pod people” — emotionless, empty, and exactly like us in looks. The three different versions of The Thing The 1951 Original The Thing from Another World, the 1982 practical-effects classic from John Carpenter, and the 2011 not-quite-different-enough prequel) present an alien entity that can mimic, mutate, and use our physiology in a purely utilitarian, wholly unsentimental way. Lynch and Cronenberg were the Davids who put an unsettling, surreal spin to this subgenre. The Brood Lost HighwayAnd Mulholland Drive, which reiterated Freud’s theories about how emotional devastationAnd trauma are key to the uncanny. And more recently, Natalie Portman got down with doppelgängers twice in Black Swan and AnnihilationJordan Peele was the one who invoked classics of spooky suburbia.Stepford WivesIn his debut directorial endeavor You must get outHis Tethered, which is a kill-happy insanity, has once again disrupted peaceful neighborhoods. Use

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What it means to be human, and how we know if someone is or isn’t, becomes the prevailing question of many of these hybrid offerings — and perhaps no film has been as unrelentingly gross in its exploration of this concept than Possession. Initially reviled, subsequently admired, and currently the recipient of a 4K restoration and nationwide rerelease, Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film is as uncomfortable as it is brilliant.

Watching PossessionIt’s like being seated next to someone in a fight and trying to not eavesdrop on their conversation. It doesn’t seem like horror at first, but Żuławski is a master at crafting tension, and incrementally introducing details that add up to a grander, more agonizing whole. It’s a stunning result.PossessionIt is both amazingly performative and intimate. The horrors of The Creature are not only the result of the character, but also the realization that not all people you love may care about you.

Every frame is affected by this duality of fragility and brutality. Possession, which was written by Żuławski and Frederic Tuten while the former was in the middle of a divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek. He had other films with her, and she was a star in them. The third part of the nightAnd The Devil In PossessionThe couple Mark (Sam Neill), a married couple, now live in the same West Berlin apartment but have lost their in-love. “Maybe all couples go through this,” she wonders as they lay in bed together, but this impasse doesn’t feel surmountable. It’s like the end.

Mark is a controlling, obsessed man. He plays with a blustering energy, but it eventually turns to jarred shock, and sensual slyness. He’ll do anything to get Anna back — confront her lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), hire a PI (Carl Duering) to trail her — but then, something strange happens. Mark meets their son Bob’s (Michael Hogben) teacher Helen (also played by Adjani), who looks just like Anna, but with lime green eyes. There’s also something a little strange: Anna has hidden a secret room in an abandoned building in a rundown area of town. It is where you would go to make your escape. Is she seeing anyone or something there?

A variety of border-pushing terrors exist, ranging from Lovecraftian horror (the aforementioned Creature), upsettingly Earthly (domestic violence and self-harm), etc. PossessionThe film was greatly edited to avoid a U.S. debut and it was banned in the U.K. This 4K restoration is a marvel with its crisp visuals, vibrant colors and stunning clarity. Every scene is emotionally overwrought, complementing the film’s obsession with inexplicable extremes. Adjani’s and Neill’s performances are gruelingly physical, including the infamous subway scene that cements Adjani’s work here as one of horror’s all-time-great hysterical women. The film’s focus on the madness-inducing effects of engineering a doppelgänger (so many dismembered limbs!) What makes this film so special? Possession It is so original in its approach.

Is it possible to create another person from a duplicate of another? Is that a good thing? What about the emotional and spiritual costs of this? Are you tempted to be a better person than the one you love? Other films have followed in the doppelgänger mold since Possession, but all of them are operating in the shadow of this film’s bleak, grim, grotesque legacy, which suggests that the fashioning of a double is an act of exploitation as destructive as a failed marriage. Many horror films have explored the trespass upon reality that a doppelgänger provides, but few have done it with as much blood, sweat, and bodily fluids as the unshakably upsetting Possession

PossessionIt is currently playing in theatres across the country and streaming on Metrograph.com exclusively through October 31.