Possession (1981 Film Review)

1981 Gaumont
Written and Directed by: Andrzej Żuławski
Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, and Heinz Bennent
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 124 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 3/10

Mark, an international spy, returns from a mission to his home in West Berlin, only to find that his wife, Anna, is no longer in love with him, and has apparently taken a lover. Mark absolutely loses his damn mind, freaks out, destroys a restaraunt, cuts himself with an electric knife, violently confronts the lover, and tries to take custody of the pair's son. Soon, however, when not even the lover knows where Anna is going at night, things take a turn for the even weirder. Turns out Anna's been renting an apartment in an old rundown building, where she's received visitors who have never walked out...and she's not the only resident...just the only one who's human...
I've found over the years, particularly after it's been pointed out to me by friends, that there's one thing I can't abide in a film: self-indulgence. Most recently, I've found myself halfway through Darren Aronofsky's Mother! or in the theater watching Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, and wishing I could go home to watch Seinfeld and eat a bowl of cereal. Such films may be intensely personal for the director, but for me, as a viewer who is himself looking for some connection with the light being projected on the wall, I often feel nothing. When everything is so heightened, when character behavior harshly veers from anything resembling actual human behavior, the director may have archetypal designs he's assigned to his actors portrayals, but I'm not privy to those, and I don't want to spend weeks of my life analyzing absolutely every frame and line of dialogue before just inferring meaning from my own life to whatever seemingly random jumble of images and sounds the director (generally in these cases, writer/director) has chosen to place on screen. I'd rather just watch a good film.
I don't care what anyone else says: Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 surrealist horror venture, Possession, is not a good film. Manically overacted from the first frames, Possession doesn't even give a realistic baseline to its proceedings. A wild-eyed Sam Neill as Mark comes home to an ensorcelled Isabelle Adjani as Anna, whose dinner plate-sized eyes seem to be looking for bugs on the wall as Neill speaks. Behavior is immediately exaggerated, interactions a strange sort of absurdist theater where each line of dialogue crashes against the next nonsensically, as characters talk directly past each other, words fading into an uncanny ether. Sure, it's beautifully shot. Sure, Adjani is indeed an ethereal and timeless beauty, often either bleeding, vomiting, or cleaning up blood and vomit here. Well-framed shots and a pretty star don't make a film. While some viewers can enthusiastically throw themselves into Possession's violent morass, I immediately found myself outside the glass, watching with disinterested disdain, wishing I could just throw on some Seinfeld and scarf down a bowl of Frosted Flakes...though with all the blood, pus, goo, and wild-eyed posturing, I think I've lost my appetite.