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Staring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer
Director: Andrzej Zulawski
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Product Details
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9786305839989
Format: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 6305839980
Label: Starz / Anchor Bay
Manufacturer: Starz / Anchor Bay
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Starz / Anchor Bay
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2000-05-09
Running Time: 123
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Theatrical Release Date: 1981

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Editorial Review
Amazon.com
Mark (Sam Neill) comes home from months on the road to find his flighty wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani in an almost bug-eyed performance), ready to divorce him. Distraught and angry, he tracks down her lover, but discovers a secret unknown to either of the men. Anna has given birth, literally, to a demon lover (created by monster maker Carlos Rimbaldi), and she'll murder anyone who dares to come between them. Full of anger, jealousy, emotional suffering, and vindictiveness, this bizarre, bleak horror film is a mix of Hollywood melodrama, European psychodrama, and the raw, blunt emotions of personal art cinema. Mark and Anna grow increasingly shrill and erratic as they sink deeper into madness and obsession, and finally doppelgängers, also played by Neill and Adjani, arise to take their place. Hints of Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and the biological horrors of David Cronenberg float through the story. The English-language French production was shot in Germany with a Polish director and an international cast, which only adds to the dissonance. Andrzej Zulawski (who claims that the film was inspired by his own divorce) directs this obscure and often alienating film with unrelenting intensity. The 2-hour film was cut down to 80 minutes for its original American release, and has only now been restored to full length. The DVD features commentary by Zulawski in conversation with his biographer, Dan Bird. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

La Posesion, 2009-05-31
I guess this was partly my fault. You see this is pretty much my favorite movie, but seeing how it's out of print, I haven't been able to get a hold of it. I go on Amazon.com and see a plethora of them. Excited I buy this copy. Didn't regard that it said "La Posesion". (whatever could just be the release from Spain..) I get it in the mail and put it on first thing. Turns out the whole movie is dubbed in Spanish. I would've hoped there would only be subtitles, but no, there are completely new voices. I'm screwed. Anyone want a dubbed copy of Possession?

Not exactly sure what to make of this one, but I liked it!., 2008-09-26
Andrzej Zulawski's 'Possession' is a weird arthouse horror film that definitely requires an open mind to appreciate, Possession was definitely a strange viewing experience. I think its a combination of surreal drama and horror its also a harrowing portrait of a disintegrating marriage and how it effects those people around it especially the kids, it's obvious that the director was going through the same experience as the characters in the film but not all of the experiences of course. I would say that the film was similar to Cronenberg's The Brood only its more European. Both Isabela Adjani and Sam Niel star as a married couple on the rocks and who's daily life have turned into mayhem. She has left him for someone else which leads to serious breakdowns and nagging, we also get to see them screaming, wailing and whacking each other with fatal results like Adjani who cuts her throat with an electric carving knife! yes very nice. Sam Neill then hires a private detective to locate his wife and that's when things get really nasty. Yelling, screaming and electric knife fights ensue as well as Adjana's character giving birth to a slimy tentacle creature in a subway who she proceeds to have sex with and feeds some people and lovers to, this is the infamous scene that was cut by the censors and I can see why since it was disgusting and horrific at the same time. This Blue Underground edition is completely uncut but I think its the same as the Anchor Bay edition which was also uncut and the special features were the same a trailer and one commentary track done by the director. Sam Niel who always plays a wierdo in most of his films was terrific in this role, at the end of his wits and constantly pushing his character and Adjani was just as good but a bit too OTT. Possession is a strange and worthy tour-de-force film, but I don't think it's going to appeal to both mainstream horror fans and serious filmgoers but it was definitely a great film that has a couple of disturbing and haunting sequences (subway birth scene) along with some weird and eccentric characters like Hienrik who knows kung-fu and the film was beautifully shot and had a dark almost depressing atmosphere and great performances from the cast.

This Movie is Beyond Anything you'd Imagine, 2009-10-02
I could honestly say that this is movie is the best movie I have ever seen, but that's been said already. What I would like to add is that it's not entirely about the divorce or political problems the directer was going through at the time, it is layered with so many symbols and and allegories that it hurts to try to figure them out. If anything, the sign of the movie's great accomplishment, is the vibe and feel that the movie leaves in it's viewers. It might be a rough movie to watch, but it is a master piece of film.

Brilliant., 2009-03-30
Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Roughly halfway through Andrzej Zulawski's criminally underrated Possession, Isabelle Adjani has a long, disjointed, tearful monologue. It is entirely out of place in the weirdness that has grown to envelop the film, and yet it's this very sense of being out of place that makes it brilliant. That's synecdochic of the entire movie, which on some levels is a simple altar to cheese, a response to Kramer vs. Kramer in the same way Harry Bromley Davenport's (similarly-underrated) XTRO is a response to E. T.: The Extraterrestrial. On every other level, however, Zulawski has created something wondrous--a film that is at times almost physically painful to watch, but is the diametric opposite of the unwatchable film. It looks as if, as bad as the average movie was that I watched in January, the average February movie is going to be great; Possession joins Hellzapoppin' and Dance of the Dead so far this month, and all three have been fantastic.

Yes, Possession is a monster movie, but don't be fooled; the monster-movie aspect of the film, which is what those few Americans who have ever heard about it know, is nothing more than a tertiary plot device. What this movie is really about, as my comparison in the first paragraph should make obvious, is the disintegration of the marriage of Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani). The two have a son, Bob (Michael Hogben in his only screen appearance), but unlike the kid in Kramer, who exists mostly as a device to tug the heartstrings of the audience, Bob, too, is kind of tertiary here. The focus is on Neill and Adjani, both in her role as Mark's wife and in her role as Helen, Bob's teacher, to whom Mark is (understandably) attracted after it's revealed that Anna's been going behind his back with Heinrich (Heinz Bennent, perhaps best known to American audiences for Le Dernier Metro), a character who, had he been written more recently, would be considered a kind of new-age Iron John guru. After Mark confronts Heinrich, he finds out that Anna hasn't been going off to see him during her more recent unexplained disappearances, so Mark hires a private detective to find out where she's actually going. The results prove to be surprising, and selectively fatal.

In many ways, I found Possession to be far more distressing than most of the horror movies released in the last twenty years. The sense of reality quickly fades a few minutes into the movie, and yet in some ways, it never does. The weirder things get, the more real it all seems. That's not an easy thing to do. As well, the farther into the film we get, the more Neill and Adjani overact, and yet the more it works. I have no idea why this works. I can't explain it. But the more overacting there is, the more powerful the movie gets. Possession is one of those movies that's like a perfect pop song; when you put together all the things that make so many pop songs entirely unlistenable in just the right manner and invest them with enough of... something, it works. Possession is a perfect example of this in the film world, and it is a movie that is not to be missed. Do whatever you must to track a copy down. **** ½

successful art, 2009-09-30
As many note, reviews are divided. A sign of what? Slavish devotion to crap of a genre or auteur? Obsessive leachery concerning Isabelle A? No. A successful work of art puts something of the object (as Lacan would put it) at play which people find captivating, disturbing and usually both. Previous reviews reek of this particular reaction to a particular director who nailed it: people recognize something at work in themselves. Thus, problems with plot, produciton value, continuity, even excess are not essentially valid issues. Its effective art and it has an effect. Telling people to stay away from this movie is on the level of not buying a Picasso because it doesn't match your couch. If you are in the mood for a narrative that reinforces your ideals, plop that in. Just leave out of something you personally can't have any fun with. That's your problem, not the film's.

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