Possession

The night before I watched this, I watched a Lars Von Trier movie (Melancholia). I probably should’ve put something like Police Academy in between. Possession is about a man (Sam Neill) who comes home after an assignment away (he’s a spy). His wife (Isabelle Adjani) is acting very erratic. The marriage is disintegrating, rapidly and sometimes violently. She’s having an affair, but there’s something more to it than that. Some movies meet you halfway; they’re a puzzle to be solved, a movie with ambiguities and mysteries that it will present, but you need to do some thinking. Some come right to you and just give you everything. Possession is content to make you come to it. It is not interested in giving you ANYTHING. It isn’t just ambiguous, it’s obtuse and almost obstructive. It isn’t like this as some kind of exercise is arthouse pretension, or auteur-like forced profundity. This movie is just WEIRD, in everything it does. The acting is somehow both arch OTT and yet convincing and mesmerizing. The story unfolds at a pace that needs historians to mark it with epochs, but it never feels lacking for movement. The cinematography doesn’t have much to work with, as 90% of this movie is interior spaces, but what it does with those spaces is something to behold. There is, tops, 3 minutes worth of score, but somehow, the lack of score works because it forces you to engage your own emotions instead of being manipulated into the feelings the movie wants. And then there’s the mid-movie left turn, which I absolutely will not discuss in detail. All I can say is, in one scene, this movie goes from a very perplexing and scenery-chewing movie about a marriage in high-speed decay to something else entirely, and then it proceeds to go all over the place. It is left turn after left turn. They’re not hard to follow, but maybe hard to swallow, but they can also be interesting because the movie has no fear. It is what it is and you’ll accept it on its terms, or you can go kick rocks. It’s a very bold and difficult movie, and I could also see it being very divisive. A movie that puts up this many walls to the viewer can and will make many run for the hills, and just as many try it and bail. But if you’re up for a movie that forces you to engage it on its terms, and are willing to let it do its thing and aren’t afraid of homework … there’s something here. Something unique.