Night 16 of 31 Nights of Horror

In 52 years, I have watched a lot of movies. Some of them have been very bizarre. I’ve seen The Forbidden Zone, A Clockwork Orange, Killer Klownz from Outer Space and most everything David Cronenberg has directed. Possession is right up there as one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever watched.

The people in this movie act weird, they stand too close, they don’t look at each other when they talk, they flail against the walls, they say the most bizarre stuff that nobody else in the scene reacts to, their characters are inconsistent from one scene to the next and I’ve watched Sam Neil sit in a chair in plenty of other movies, so I know he can do it without looking so manic, so this all must be intentional on the part of the director.

It has to be an art style I’m unfamiliar with. A film student could probably tell us it’s part of the neo-brutalist-hyper-realism school or something, but it just confused the hell out of me. Judging from the high ratings on almost every platform, 74% on The Movie Database, 7.2 on IMDB, 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m one of the few viewers who didn’t understand it.

The blurb for this movie describes it like this “A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.” So you’re probably thinking what I was. She’s possessed. It’s going to be a film about demonic possession (I mean it’s in the title, right?) that sounds cool. No. That’s not what it’s about at all. I’m still not sure what it WAS about. The closest I can come is that it is an allegory for the possessiveness we feel towards people we are in a relationship with. Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it most of the night and I’m still baffled by what I watched.

I just spent about ten minutes trying to explain to my wife all the strange and incomprehensible weirdness that is Possession, but I’m not going to do that here. Why? Because despite everything I’ve said so far, I didn’t hate this movie. I’m not going to say I liked it, or that I’ll watch it again, but I also don’t want to deprive anyone else of the experience of watching it unspoiled. It is bizarre and hideous in a fashion that makes you unable to look away.