I’m the Maker of My Own Evil

Possession (1981) Dir. Andrzej Żuławski

I thought it might be nice to hear from an opinion other than my own this month. So as a special treat, I asked my friend and excellent culture writer Claire Biddles if she’d be interested in writing about any of the films I planned to illustrate this month.

She was kind enough to say yes, and picked 1981’s Possession. An intense, sublime movie and one that Claire has a personal perspective on that I think is way more interesting than anything I could say about it. Over to Claire:

“I can't exist by myself because I'm afraid of myself – because I'm the maker of my own evil.” – Anna

What do Claire Denis’ vampire horror Trouble Every Day, Bergman’s monochrome tragedy Through a Glass Darkly and Satoshi Kon’s anime classic Millenium Actress have in common? A sense of sustained intensity perhaps – but also a coveted place on my Letterboxd list ‘BPD canon’, an entirely speculative and unverified collection of films with characters who have, or vibes that exude the experience of, Borderline Personality Disorder.

I started the list after finally getting a diagnosis of BPD after five or six years of waiting lists and assessments. One of the online resources pointed towards a ‘fictional characters with BPD’ webpage, presumably so I’d have something to relate to. It’s objectively funny that all of the characters were villains – my favourite example was Anakin Skywalker, literal Darth Vader – but the film nerd in me craved my own list of films and characters that oozed the pain, drama and emotional whiplash that constitutes life with BPD, a condition that causes extreme mood swings, impulsivity, intense emotionality and an unstable sense of self, among other symptoms.

I see my blinkered, all-or-nothing, pathologised romanticism in melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, my unpleasant tendency towards self-destruction in Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, all my self-aggrandising, shattered personas in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. It’s not surprising that horror films form much of the list – whether in their purest form (The Exorcist, Audition) or in psychologically haunting films that skirt the edges of horror (The Reflecting Skin, The Servant).

Despite its incorporation of monster design and inclusion on the infamous 1980s ‘video nasties’ list, Polish director Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession fits more easily with the latter grouping. The complex plot is difficult to summarise, but it basically follows a couple, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill), in the throes of divorce in divided Berlin. After suffering a miscarriage, Anna has a psychotic break, leaves the couple’s child to fend for himself, and takes a somewhat unconventional lover in a run-down flat in Kreuzberg. There are doppelgangers, deaths and police raids. Beginning as a fairly standard relationship drama, the film turns into a cross between a Cold War psychological thriller and a creature feature, concluding with the sort of apocalyptic realism that rivals Threads.

Most striking is the way that Żuławski portrays personal pain as a physical manifestation, through the doppelgangers created by Mark and Anna. Mark’s doppelganger – a creation of Anna’s – is monstrous at first; a reflection of her inner turmoil. Throughout the film, it becomes more human, more ‘real’ – an idealised caretaker, everything Mark is not… or an abomination waiting to turn on Anna, and the world at large? As an analogy to mental illness, it’s outrageous, almost tacky – but it maps onto BPD because the illness is also melodramatic and over-the-top.

Also astonishing is the film’s famous central sequence, which depicts Anna’s violent miscarriage in a Berlin subway station – astonishingly performed by Adjani, who won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. The image of Adjani thrashing maniacally against the subway’s tiles have become an icon of horror cinema in the decades since the film’s release, but watching the full scene is like watching a mini opera unfold, in all its wretched stages of grief. Like the doppelgangers of the film, the scene feels like a physical manifestation of illness at its height and maximum intensity.

With all its untethered mania and twisty plot points, Possession is hard to mould into one definitive analogy. There’s also layered allusions to espionage and double agents (in the setting, Mark’s work as a spy and the film’s multiple doppelgangers), the trap of heteronormativity (in the shaping of ‘ideal’ husband and wife doppelgangers, with severe consequences) and even Żuławski’s then-recent real-life divorce. As with all the most enduring horror films, we project what we need to on Possession, and allow it to play out as a reflection of our own perceived evil.

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can stream it for free on BFI Player/Amazon.

Pairs well with

I think Repulsion (1965, dir. Roman Polanski [retch], available to rent for £3.49 from YouTube/Google/Amazon/Apple) works as a perfect pairing with Possession and it also appears on Claire’s BPD Canon list.

Warning: It is a Polanski film, so I totally understand if you don’t want to watch and support a film made by a serial sexual abuser.

Further Reading

• The excellent House of Psychotic Women book is essential reading in relation to Possession.
• Also essential is the Final Girls mini-season about the book and the films it covers.
• A list of the films covered in the book is also a great list of must-see horror films.
• A great deep-dive into the film by David West - Possession: A Marriage of the Natural and the Supernatural.

Other Recommendations

• Tentacle related - an old favourite: Maggie Mae Fish reviewing the creepy My Octopus Teacher like the horror film it really is. Justice for Collective (or The Mole Agent or Time, anything but My Octopus Teacher) at the 2020 Oscars!
• While I’m recommending random YouTube videos, Super Eyepatch Wolf’s essay on Horror in Liminal Spaces is great.
• World of Horror - a text-based horror game inspired by the work of Junji Ito and Lovecraft looks interesting. I’ve not played it yet but here’s a Rock, Paper, Shotgun review.