Day 23: Possession

Day 23 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: cheating, blood and gore, body horror, domestic abuse, child neglect, emetophobia, stalking, animal death, self harm

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

I'm tired.



Possession follows a couple, Mark and Anna, as they both try to cope with their rapidly deteriorating marriage and the effect it has on their lives. Mark is both abusive and desperate to get his wife back, and Anna is unstable and has a few secrets she's been keeping from her husband.

I don't really know how to talk about this movie. I think it being designated as a "video nasty" gave me a false impression of what it might be like. Disgusting and shocking but never exploitative. Unrestrained eroticism and creepily restrained but still nauseating violence. Emotionally devastating to the point of leaving me both numb and restless. This film feels like the inside of my mind during a panic attack.

I think largely it reflects the reality of the nuclear family and heteronormativity. Humans were not meant to be so restrained. We were meant to love and exist freely as the people we are and wish to be. It's not any of our faults that we're forced into one half of this false binary by a letter on our birth certificates, but by the time we have control over our lives as adults it's so ingrained it feels inescapable.

Mark and Anna are both victims in their own right. Mark who, despite everything, wishes to return to a sense of mind numbing normalcy and Anna who, despite everything, wishes desperately to escape it. She wants to build her own identity but doesn't have any idea how.

Mark can hide behind the one built for him by default, but Anna cannot if she wishes to become whole. And ultimately, she fails. She tries to fill these gaps in herself by behaving like men are expected to. Sexually promiscuous, unhinged, deceptive, and mercilessly violent.

Despite Mark wanting to exist within the accepted structures of society, he is not able to. No one is, Mark is, in his own ways, just like everyone else. Not brave enough to claw his way out of the life he doesn't want and not docile enough to live peacefully inside of it.

But with all of that, they both end up the same.

This false plastic love will leave you simultaneously a rotting fucking corpse and a shell of the person you used to be.