POSSESSION

Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

One of those bat-sh@t crazy movies that has become beloved by rep cinema audiences everywhere, POSSESSION is ridiculous and glorious.

A marriage movie that uses body horror and extreme performance to relay the unbearable anguish of a relationship tearing people apart.

Mark (Neill), a spy, returns to West Berlin to find his wife, Anna (Adjani) distant. When he discovers her affair with sensual German, Heinrech, Mark teeters on nervous breakdown. But Anna hides a much more disturbing secret-some kind of monster/creature she is sexually obsessed with to the point of murder.

Mark and Anna engage in a love-hate scorched earth battle while their son, Bob, largely gets relegated to the side.

Add to this Bob's teacher looks exactly like Anna and Mark himself has a doppleganger who will make himself known in time.

There's a lot going on here folks.

Almost immediately, cinephiles will sense a kinship with David Cronenberg's THE BROOD-another body horror about divorce but POSSESSION stakes out its own territory.

Polish moviemaker Zulawski had just stopped production on his sci-fi epic ON THE SILVER GLOBE (which he would finish in 1989) and POSSESSION shares much of the manic, ambitious, hysterical DNA of that incredible picture.

POSSESSION is a movie where nobody holds anything back. The performances are so gonzo, they become avant garde theater. One has to admire and commend Adjani and Neill for committing fully. The choices DO work. And a sense of crazy love mutually assured destruction is communicated with a strange clarity.

The creature/monster/alien courtesy of ALIEN, ET, DUNE puppeteer maestro Carlo Rambaldi is suitably amphibious and disquieting.

What POSSESSION is exactly trying to say is up for debate. With each crazy choice, plot twist, ante-upping, it becomes more a movie to be experienced and felt than analyzed.

In some ways, it may be one of the most effective "I have to make this movie to exorcise my break-up" movies of all time. It's hard to be sympathetic to either Mark or Anna. And yet, we never feel totally alienated from their struggle. You almost watch the movie with the humility of understanding that love and break ups can drive all of us crazy.

That you're watching ACTUAL craziness on screen that then translates to David Lynch-David Cronenberg levels of sex/gore/subconscious image making becomes its own cinematic delight. If you're into watching movies that push the envelope, you're going to love this movie.

A movie this committed to making every scene a jaw dropper is going to fall flat on its face sometimes. And POSSESSION does. Some scenes are laughable. And Zulawski seems to love monologues where characters talk about God, faith, chance, death in a way nobody off a theater stage would.

But Zulawski, as in SILVER GLOBE, also communicates profound thoughts more often than ponderous/empty pretentious ones.

You have to accept the capital A "Art cinema" approach Zulawski is committed to. But if you allow for that kind of intermittent pretentiousness, you also allow for brilliance.

POSSESSION's greatest feat may be that everyone here is committed to making a bold, shocking, emotional, indescribable movie.

POSSESSION is cinema. In that you have to see it to really understand what it's all about.

Craig Hammill is the founder/programmer of Secret Movie Club.