It turned out I hadn’t known the movie at all, as I had only watched the U.S. release back in the day—a version from which 43 minutes had been cut to turn it into an easily marketable grindhouse movie that then tanked nevertheless.
Possession is one of those movies where a review would be a disfavor, and even an analytical paper or essay should be wary of “interpretation” and let the film do the talking instead.
Thus, only a few observations.
- With at least five important angles, the political level seems to me stronger than it’s usually accounted for: the Berlin Wall; the spy thriller first as background and later as a plot device; the Body Snatchers paranoia as a well-known trope for conformity panic, especially via communist infiltration; Bob’s increasingly belligerent toys and playing habits; and the final collapse of the Cold War order into actual war or (okay, this is interpretation) the kind of war superseding the Cold War that Spivak calls Hot Peace.
- Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic comes to mind, of course, and with it Irigaray’s genealogy of the monstrous; but as vectors of power and control on the one hand and eerie domestication on the other continue to be robustly perpetuated, these approaches’ explanatory power seems limited.
- Everything from the acting to the dialogues to the cinematography appears willfully theatrical and histrionic—a sequence of increasingly intense stage postures and gestures with deliberately dramatic and emotional exaggerations plus more than enough modern elements including Realism (Ibsen), the Theater of the Absurd (Ionesco), or the Theater of Cruelty (Artaud) to make it more than merely reminiscent of the Eclectic Sixties (Pinter).
The importance and/or legitimacy of a “theatrical view” as proposed in the third observation seems to be underscored by one of Anna’s script lines:
And then I read private life is a stage, only I’m playing in many parts that are smaller than me and yet I still play them. I suffer, I believe, I am…
A monster of a movie about monsters whom it might be necessary to confront.
Possession by Andrzej Żuławski, 1981.
Watched at the Metropol theater on August 7, 2026, in its original language.