After 45 Years, Divisive Horror Classic Gains Timeless Relevance

(SeaPRwire) –   Time can redeem all things, and for films, it can transform failures into beloved works. Movies like The Thing, The Shining, and Blade Runner initially confused and even repelled critics, yet they are now hailed as masterpieces. Upon its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s experimental horror film Possession also sparked controversy. With its strange premise and style, it was banned in the United Kingdom as a so-called “video nasty.”

As cinematic history often shows, the film has reversed its fortunes 45 years later. This notoriously disturbing movie has gathered a dedicated and expanding cult audience. A forthcoming remake by Parker Finn, starring Robert Pattinson and Margaret Qualley, could push this experimental horror further into the mainstream, if it hasn’t arrived there already.

It is now time to discern the logic within Żuławski’s chaos. Beyond the visceral gore and human-monster intimacy (more on that later), lies a poignant, enduring story about the end of a relationship. Żuławski based the film on his own divorce. He returned to Warsaw to bring his wife and child back to France, only to discover his wife was leaving him—a scenario that essentially opens Possession. Mark (Sam Neill) comes home to learn his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) desires a life elsewhere with another—or rather, another thing. Contemporary critics praise the film for its portrayal of the visceral anguish of a disintegrating marriage, the torment of parting from a loved one, and the confusion of not grasping the reasons why.

However, time has also revealed the film to be more foresighted than originally thought. While Żuławski intended to make a movie about divorce, he inadvertently captured the surreal quality of modern life, primarily through the film’s absurd, baffling, and excessive style. Nothing in the movie conventionally “makes sense.” The plot hinges on Mark discovering his wife is involved with an octopus-like creature. This creature then transforms into Mark. This new Mark connects with a new Anna (yes, she has a double as well)… Understand?

Then there is the acting, which is just as relentless and perplexing as the narrative. Dialogue rapidly shifts from long speeches to violent screams and fragmented words delivered through gasps and spasmodic movements. Adjani flings and contorts her body with such wild abandon, often during ordinary talks and daily tasks, that she appears genuinely possessed. (Unsurprisingly, she won Best Actress at Cannes for this role, alongside her work in James Ivory’s Quartet.)

It is precisely this fusion of the mundane—like domestic squabbles over “who will pick up our kid from school”—with an absurd aesthetic that generates a surreal feeling of familiarity. Viewing it in 2026, there is something even more recognizable in how nothing is logical yet life continues. While tentacled monsters and doppelgangers may not lurk in closets, there is a definite sense that the world no longer runs on logic and reason. Instead, scholar Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and writer John Schoneboom describe a shift from rationality to what they term Surrealpolitik. De Carvalho states this is an age where “actions by global leaders produce a sense of strangeness and seem inconsistent with reason, moving beyond reality.”

In our era of surrealpolitik, politicians and presidents act more like internet memes than individuals. Today, much as in Possession, a flood of excess and nonsense submerges the world in a sensation of unreality. The film’s stubborn commitment to the extremely ridiculous meets the moment, or in today’s parlance of absurd trends, it perfectly encapsulates the era’s “surreal-maxxing.” Get it?

Possession also carries its own political history, which further informs Schoneboom’s concept of surrealpolitik as a hallucinatory network fueled by expanding totalitarian and surveillance cultures. The film was shot and set in Cold War-era West Berlin. This political strain shadows its characters. The Berlin Wall is introduced at the film’s start, with graffiti reading “Die Mauer muss weg” (“the wall must go”) shown before the credits. It looms over the characters, forming the backdrop to the couple’s apartment and Anna’s hidden flat. Amidst marital fights, they gaze out the window at the wall. Soldiers watch back through binoculars.

Existing in this perpetually monitored world, where a nuclear bomb could (literally or metaphorically) detonate at any second, it is easy to conceive of being driven to hysteria—to comprehend the impulse to, like Anna, discard your groceries and shriek against the walls of a train station.

The horror of watching Possession now lies in recognizing the madness of its characters, and how the disasters of their fractured world mold the paranoia, fear, and anxieties that seep into and shatter their relationships and their grip on reality. If films like Mickey 17 and One Battle After Another capture the political events of today, Possession illustrates the emotional experience of enduring them.

Possession is available for streaming on the Criterion Channel and AMC+.