You Love to See It: Possession (Patreon)

Anna sits on the couch beside her husband, Mark, who wants to talk to her about her sudden dereliction from their family. As he whines and wheedles she remains expressionless, listening without comment or affect. Actress Isabelle Adjani’s mouth is open just the slightest crack, her huge, pale eyes only mostly focused. The scene begins to fade. In Anna’s mind she walks through a nearly deserted subway station, her footsteps echoing from the tiled walls. She’s carrying groceries, and as she reaches an access tunnel connecting the platform and ticketing stations to the outer concourse, she begins to grin with a terrible, manic energy. Her eyes bulge, all staring whites. She walks side-on, as much insect as human, limbs stiff, her expression a writhing tangle of demented glee.

And then it breaks. She shrieks. She convulses. She dashes her head against the wall (Adjani did this accidentally, but director Andrzej Żuławski kept the take). Blood pours from between her legs. Something like spoiled cream pours from her screaming mouth as she collapses to her knees in a puddle of mingled blood and milk, as though lactation and heavy bleeding have become synonymous, all the arduous physical work of her life as a wife, mother, and homemaker bleeding out of her into a rancid pool that soaks through her dress and smears the subway wall. And then, as she kneels screaming in her own filth, we fade back to her, still sitting on the couch, still listening to Mark. This, Possession suggests, is Anna’s inner life. This is what her relationship with her husband feels like.

The rest of the film drags the world into Anna’s emotional reality. It emerges from her in the form of a tentacled, worm-like monstrosity to which she feeds unwitting men until it matures into a copy of her husband. Perhaps it was conceived during her silent, habitually concealed breakdown in the middle of their talk. Perhaps it is a way for her to exert ownership over her diseased relationship. Perhaps, having endured the grinding misery of domestic life for so long, its cringing man-child reincarnation is only thing to which her body can give life.