Possession

Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his Berlin home from unspecified – though clearly cloak and dagger – business abroad hoping to reconcile himself with his estranged wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani).

After going through Anna's papers, Mark finds out about her lover, Heinrich, and arranges a meeting with Anna, whereupon she announces that she is leaving for Heinrich, leading Mark to suffer a nervous breakdown.

Three weeks later, Mark wakes up. For a time it seems Anna has returned to him but then she disappears. Mark goes to confront Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), but discovers that Anna is not there – Heinrich has been out of town since Mark returned from abroad.

Wondering what has happened, Mark hires a firm of private investigators to locate Anna. What they find is bizarre and shocking: Anna has a new lover, a tentacled, reptilian monster by whom she is pregnant. The creature, it is also implied, is God…

As this synopsis suggests, Possession Polish-born auteur Andrej Zulawski is not afraid of melodramatic excess, nor intellectual pretentiousness. Attitude, however, is not quite enough.

It's not that Zulawski is a bad director, more that he over-estimates his talents somewhat and appears to expect the audience to accept whatever he, the self-proclaimed genius, dishes up in front of them, no questions asked.

On the plus side, he makes good use of the Cold War era Berlin locations to create an unsettling atmosphere and draws committed, if somewhat one-dimensional, performances from his international cast.

On the downside, there are too many subplots that go nowhere, like the schoolteacher who looks like Anna and may or may not be a figment of Mark's imagination and the conflict between Mark and his bosses in the organisation, and much that is simply bad, like a five minute plus scene of Adjani freaking out in the underground.

While Zulawski would no doubt want his film to be seen sui generis, perhaps the best way to summarise it, for better or worse, is as a head on collision between David Cronenberg's The Brood and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. In other words, as a piece of arthouse exploitation that may well fall into the void between the two camps.

Maybe the DVD commentary between the director and his biographer will make it all clear, but somehow I doubt it…