Trailer
Assistive Technologies

Possession (1981)

Runtime
2hrs 4mins
Directed by
Andrzej Zulawski
Featuring
Isabelle Adjani,
Sam Neill
Body

Spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to West Berlin after a mission to find that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants a divorce. She is having an affair, but insists that isn't the reason. 

When Mark hires a private detective to get to the truth, an even more disturbing secret is uncovered—Anna keeps a separate apartment housing an otherworldly, tentacled creature with a ravenous sexual appetite (created by special effects legend Carlo Rambaldi of Alien fame). So continues the descent into a nightmarish maze of jealousy, carnality devoid of satisfaction, insanity, terror and murder—where identity and reality are almost impossible to distinguish. 

Set in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, infused with Cold War-era paranoia and tension, Possession is a film that defies classification. One of the most tortured portraits of a disintegrating marriage ever presented on screen, visionary director Andrzej Zulawski masterfully blends horror and thriller conventions into an utterly unique cinema experience—drawing on his own traumatic divorce and creative blacklisting in his native Poland.

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