The playwright August Strindberg once wrote, “Could there be anything more terrifying than a husband and wife who hate each other?” Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession, set in a drab and chilly West Berlin, asks and answers the same question.
Sam Neill (yes, of Jurassic Park) plays Mark, a businessman and possible spy who goes mad with hurt and fury when his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani, Queen Margot) unexpectedly demands a divorce. Almost immediately, the two lock in a desperate, hysterical, bloody clash, and things only get more intense from there. Anna is having an affair, but she’s hiding something far more grotesque. A curdled relationship morphs into a domestic nightmare of doppelgangers, monsters, and murder. This is not the type of horror movie you take your friends to for a laugh; this is what you watch with your ex and realize how much worse things could have been.
Possession is screening at The Beacon now through October 30.
