Like many other uncompromising film masterpieces, it's not easy to tell what Possession is all about. One thing is what Zulawski wants to convey through his Freudian straitjacket upside down - where eerily beautiful doubles and a not-so-beautiful love monster open up for interpretive spin - but it's not just-just to give a summary of the madness either. At the center is at least the couple Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani), who are about to slip apart. They live in an apartment in East Berlin, together with their son Bob, right by the Berlin Wall, where some guards keep an urgent eye on their living room window. In an early scene where the couple lies in bed and discusses the cohabitation situation, Zulawski creates an authentic depiction of the conversation about a relationship that ebbs out.

Here may be the key to making such a frenetic and surreal film as Possession work on an emotional level. The intrusive hysteria is experienced as something absolutely necessary for the state the film is to channel. The morbid, claustrophobic expression, in which a clingy and hand-held camera captures the feverish reality of the two constantly moving bodies, actually feels extremely realistic - an expressionist depiction of a real human psyche.

Possession is a kind of redemptive acceptance of the irrational and the crazy. In the film, Mark is very concerned with maintaining order and dignity, and perhaps this is what makes Anna so desperate and ashamed, while at the same time the need she has for sexual detachment is something instinctive she can not prevent. Anna's love nest is a sparsely furnished apartment where she hides a faceless creature, who is still developing - and with whom she has sex. The legendary monster Carlo Rambaldi (Alien, E.T., Profondo Rosso) is behind the impressive monster.

In the UK, Possession was banned as a video nasty, while the film was distributed in the US as more pure horror after undergoing a hefty make-over in the editing room. Today, the film is fortunately available in uncensored form, and is considered a transcendental work of art.