Although Possession seems clearly inspired by Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant, the director does not follow the same path as Roman Polanski. While the author of Repulsion tended towards psychological thrillers rather than horror films and left much to the realm of conjecture, Żuławski ruthlessly uses the poetics of gore cinema and multiplies bloody scenes. In addition, the director decided to explicitly show a hideous, octopus-like monster, which at the time was a rather risky artistic move, even despite the fact that the monster was designed by Carlo Rambaldi himself, a special effects expert who had previously worked on Alien. Using the rich repertoire of the genre, however, Żuławski did not stop at pure entertainment and created an ambiguous work susceptible to various symbolic readings.
The motif of doppelgangers, which appears in the film, allows us to interpret Possession as a story about people torn between ego and id, or – depending on the interpretation – good and evil, faith in the order of the world and the conviction of the total chaos of reality. The best example of the representation of a character’s internal struggle is the famous scene in the metro during which Anna wriggles in convulsions and performs something like a spasmodic dance that leads simultaneously to a miscarriage and to the birth of a monster. According to a psychological reading, the monstrosity could be an emanation of the sense of alienation that a woman carries within herself, unfulfilled in her relationship with her husband. Possession, however, can also be interpreted in a religious key (in the context of the question of the origin of evil) and in a historical-political key (as an allegory of a world divided by an iron curtain, saturated with evil).
What makes Possession a highly original film, however, is above all the audiovisual form. Unlike Polanski, from the very beginning Żuławski shows a world on the verge of madness, caricatured, grotesque and unreal. The restless camera, led by Andrzej Jaroszewicz, either circles around the characters or nervously follows them, while the wide-angle lenses used deform the image to the extreme. No less evocative is the film’s set design – suffice it to mention the increasingly chaotic interiors of the Berlin flats, the old tenement house filled with death and decay, or the squalid bar that is the setting for Mark’s progressing insanity. The emotional temperature of the film, however, is due primarily to the actors, who created expressive, over-the-top roles that are both physically and mentally exhausting. It is said that Isabelle Adjani, who won a prize at Cannes for her participation in the film, paid for her appearance in Possession with her health and continued to recover for several years after the premiere.
