Possession has been officially promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. This post is left here for historical purposes. Please read the official Certified Weird entry.
AKA: The Night the Screaming Stops
DIRECTED BY: Andrzej Zulawski
FEATURING: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton
PLOT: A secret agent finds himself in a real mess when he hires a detective to track his unfaithful wife.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: With campy acting, absurdist elements mixed with existentialist philosophy, arty cinematography, and a story full of all kinds of bizarre and wacky stuff like sex with sea creatures, pointless self mutilation, and people making funny faces for no apparent reason, Possession is practically tailor made to make the List. While I personally don’t think Possession represents a serious effort to convey meaning substantial enough to qualify for the List, I am confident that most viewers will strongly disagree with me. Possession has a resolute feel about it that will be enough to convince most fans of weird movies that it is a meaningful and significantly weird cinematic endeavor. Out of deference to those fans I hereby recommend it without reservation.
COMMENTS: A love triangle among eccentric characters spirals out of control and becomes a love octagon. And the protagonist’s girlfriend is in love with some of kind of octopussy thing.
Sam Neil plays a spy who quits his job to spend more time with his girlfriend and out of wedlock son. She leaves him, he has a nervous breakdown that leads to a three-week black-out, he meets the new boyfriend who is quite completely insane and possibly a little queer for Sam.
Sam dates his son’s teacher who appears to be his wife’s twin. Meanwhile the wife leaves the new boyfriend for another boyfriend who is some kind of extraterrestrial octopus, to whom she feeds a succession of uninvited guests, such as a private detective and an insane window inspector (yes that’s right, an insane window inspector.)
In the midst of all of this, the characters physically and verbally convulse in spastic apoplexies Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: POSSESSION (1981)
Told as almost Gothic horror, set in a sufficiently terrifying seaside villa, Amer starts out with an eight or nine year old Ana, running from room to room, trying her best to outsmart both her overbearing mother and the ugly crone of a witch that was her grandfather’s caretaker, while attempting to steal a necklace she must pry out of her ancient grandfather’s cold dead hands. The film takes on a magical feel right away, as an insidious doom overshadows all that is happening around her and her young eyes are assaulted by the evil that lurks around her and (in a scene of frenetic, salacious eroticism) the writhing, sweating bodies of her parents bedroom. The terror, both metaphorical and physical, that will eventually devour Ana, is already beginning to surround this wide-eyed little girl.
Tess (Rosalind Rubin) is strapped to a chair in a desolate location. She is being held hostage by Nick. In lesser hands this would have been the predictable setup for an adolescent excuse to show a torture fest, but Bilinski and the superb Rubin invest kinetic, tense excitement into the conflict. Nick has poisoned Tess. Her salvation lies in information that Nick requires regarding the death of his wife, Annie (Jen Lilley). Rubin hypnotically conveys fear, frustration, and futile effort as she witnesses humanity slipping away from her captor, who is engulfed in grief. Nick’s ability to empathize trickles away like water into sewage. He is more fascinated than compassionate when the poison begin to take hold of Tess. Wracked with pain, Tess’ 