Possession (1981)

Mark (Sam Neill) returns to West Berlin after an absence to find that Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants to leave him. His desperate attempt to understand the collapse of their marriage becomes an obsessive investigation, pushing the pair through jealousy, violence, doubles, political unease and increasingly impossible territory.

Andrzej Żuławski’s first and only English-language feature was made in the aftermath of his own divorce and shot in a divided West Berlin, turning intimate crisis into a feverish collision of relationship drama, psychological horror and body horror. Possession premiered in competition at Cannes in 1981, where Adjani won Best Actress for both this film and Quartet. In Britain it was later swept onto the Director of Public Prosecutions’ notorious “video nasties” list, despite the BBFC having already passed it uncut. Its creature effects were created by Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to create E.T. Once notorious as extreme cult horror, Possession has since undergone a major critical reassessment, placing joint 243rd in Sight and Sound’s 2022 critics’ poll.