Possession (1981)

Marriage can go very wrong. But has it ever gone this wrong? Not electric knife auto-decapitation countered by forearm slicing wrong (It doesn’t hurt: that’s what she said). Not inevitable new age German daddy affair, live-in mom included wrong (oh Heinrich we love you get up). Not the kid you already fucked up by naming Bob left to his own devices—when his schoolteacher, clearly his mother in a wig, is not stopping by to bathe him—in an flat that looks like Black Friday night at Mervyn’s wrong. Not milk-shattering solo subway tunnel meltdown wrong. All of this is regular marital hell. And we’ve all lost it in a subway tunnel. We’re talking demon lover fed with the blood of all who foolishly follow us into our tentacular cross-town sex den wrong. Like, bad enough to turn the word almost into a devastating trigger for the rest of your doppelgängered life. Possession is aptly named because it actually destroys your personality for the length of the film. You will gibber. You will gawp. You might even put your hand over your mouth. And you will never be the same. 5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson

We’re not supposed to identify with Anna (Isabelle Adjani), the female antagonist of Possession. It’s her husband, Mark (Sam Neill), who captains the story, a proxy for filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski. “I’m at war against women,” Mark says. Yeah, bro, we know. “I feel nothing for no one,” his wife Anna intones, but she’s lying. She does feel something for someone. Not for Heinrich, who she took as a lover when Mark was away doing important man stuff. Heinrich, well, he’s married to the sea (his mother), and he’s been out to sea a long time. Nor does Anna feel much for Margit, her best frenemy. And certainly there’s nada for Mark and Anna’s son, Bob, who is not either of his parents’ 5th or 6th priorities. When Mark employs the world’s worst detectives to find out where his estranged wife is going, one of them accidentally manages to infiltrate Anna’s shitty fuckpad, only to be greeted by a squirming pile of snotty, spunky viscera. “He’s very tired. He made love to me all night,” Anna says, by way of introduction. The detective looks like he wants to say, “Ma’am, that is a plate of rigatoni” but instead he tries to shoot it. Men, amirite? The detective is horrified only long enough for Anna to beat him to death with a liter of milk. Mark, when he inevitably walks in on Anna getting dicked down by a pile of tentacles, will also be similarly horrified. The director certainly wants us to be horrified. But, listen, I’ve been divorced twice and I’ve subsequently fallen deeply in love with an imaginary lover who cannot disappoint me both times. Really, though: Whomst among us has not had a parasocial relationship with the perfect plate of rigatoni? Who has yet to realize that a Womanizer paired with a 4-minute supercut of 3-d monsterfucking results in a better orgasm than our husbands ever gave us? Sir, that’s my emotional support plate of rigatoni, I imagine Anna saying, in the Karyn Kusama remake we will hopefully get in 2031. He’s almost perfect. Almost. 5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Ruby Locke