Possession

Frazer MacDonald reviews a tense and slightly unhinged cult horror set in Cold War Berlin…

Andrej Zulawski’s Possession was made eight years before the Wall came down. Although at the time it was a commercial and critical flop, it has since gained cult status as a film that explores that particular era of Berlin’s history.

The film tells the story of a West Berlin spy who comes back from a job to discover his home life has been turned upside down. The city is changing; his wife is seeing someone else, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. For the viewer, it’s not hard to understand why his wife wants to leave: Mark himself, played by a terrifying Sam Neill, is abusive, and always seems to be on the verge of a violent outburst (early on in the film, he has to be taken from a café by force after smashing up the place).

Presumably to add a juicy layer of confusion, their son’s school teacher looks like a clone of his wife, but with deep green contact lenses and without the subdued, functional clothing of Communist East Germany that Anna wears; rather, the schoolteacher doppelgänger (who goes unnamed) dresses in more modern attire, always looking as if she’s just stepped off a fashion runway.

Possession is a film of intense claustrophobia: most of its runtime features small, cramped flats (with the exception of one scene in a meeting room towards the beginning and a couple of outdoor scenes), and the camera is constantly zoomed into the actor’s faces, giving the entire production a woozy, ‘fever-dream’ effect. It also feels constantly on the precipice of violence; you never quite know what’s going to happen, or when, but there’s a distinct sense that at some point the action will come to blows.

Given that, Possession is a horror film in the purest sense: it wants to make the audience think, but it wants to make them squirm too, and at no point does it let them off the hook. Intellectually, the film’s paranoid atmosphere is reminiscent of the Cold War era, one in which nobody could fully trust each other, and there was a growing rift between people who believed in the economic systems of each side.

The Berlin Wall is a constant throughout, like a monolithic but sentient presence constantly watching over the action—in fact, there’s a good view of it from Mark and Anna’s apartment. It could even be said that the Wall is one of the film’s most essential characters, especially as it feels oddly prescient of the immense social change that would come eight years after its release.

Many of Possession’s filming locations are still there, and look remarkably similar today as they do in the film. Anna and Mark’s apartment was on Bernauer Straße, one of the most storied stretches of the former Wall and in fact the site of the official Berlin Wall Museum and Memorial. The aforementioned cafe scene, in which Anna and Mark argue, was filmed in Cafe Einstein on Kurfürstenstraße, where other famous films like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds have been filmed thanks to its layered history and atmospheric interior.