Make way, you fucks! We got us an all-timer, here!

Possession (1981)

There’s a grammar to cinema. Like the grammar to everything else it’s mostly obvious, proudly tedious, implemented by people who lack confidence in their ability to create anything of interest themselves and as a result are hellbent on ruining everyone’s fun and, worst of all, boring. I don’t want a movie that shows me the world through my own eyes. I see the world through my own eyes every day. It’s my default setting.

So it’s always a breath of (gory, weirdly-tentacled) air when a movie comes along that extremely, deliciously doesn’t give a fuck about the rules as they are currently understood. This elevation above the rolling seas of mediocrity can happen for any number of reasons, but in my estimation it’s most often done by realizing that rules are relative. They only need to make sense to each other. Accomplish that, and enjoy getting away with whatever the fuck you want.

Possession is so good at being a ghost story that it doesn’t even bother having a ghost in it. It’s presence by absence: there’s a field effect at play in every scene, invisible except for when it bursts into violent life through the vectors of Mark and Anna. The obvious word for this is subtext, but I don’t think that does the film justice. We’re not just seeing a lone idea (“Marriage, am I right?”) lying in wait, but a whole, concurrent second film (and maybe a third, a fourth) only visible through the weird ways in which it interacts with the first. The presence of another story is, well, a both a presence and another story. Subtext isn’t this fucking interesting.

This movie was directed by a panic attack, produced by an existential crisis, and written by a hallucination. The script was probably in Aramaic. And that fucking editing, man – cuts deliberately misplaced so they don’t line up with the expected beats of cinematic storytelling, moments ending slightly too early and at a slightly wonky pace, new scenes beginning without warning; we’re constantly deposited, disoriented, into the next moment, no time to gather ourselves or even really breathe. Imagine trying to take that phantom step on a staircase and eating shit, but in movie form, and for two fucking hours.

This movie is so fucking confident in its vision that it even knows how far it can take its gory-ass internal logic before the whole thing collapses into parody. Mark rocks in that fucking rocking chair like a Muppet on meth, but he’s so sickly and wild-eyed that you forget to laugh; the same effect occurs when he and the private investigator are talking in the latter’s office, both swiveling comically in their chairs in complete contrast to the seriousness of their conversation. Anna’s breakdowns always plummet towards parody only to swerve away at the last moment into something awful. They’re masterclasses in riding the limit without the effect being broken. This whole movie is a masterclass in riding the limit without the effect being broken.

The End

Lord, I love me a real movie. One complete unto itself and feeling no obligation to be complete unto anything else. Engrained so fully inside of its own logic that no amount of absurdity can possibly break the spell; subject to mechanics that – no matter how esoteric – always seem traceable back to the plane we live in, though never through any obvious method. Nothing is truly detached from reality if it’s continuing to create its own. Possession isn’t a flight from our plane – it’s an extension of it.