Possession (1981)

Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking.

That the film is much more than a gawk-at-it freak show is testament to Zulawski's talent for making even the most exaggerated behavior resonate with pointed and potent emotion.

Zulawski's grand and shivery art-therapy hallucination, a burlesque farrago of domestic dramas played close and fast in a distinctively Polish register

A film about a woman who fucks an octopus.

The film could be seen as a metaphor for women's liberation, the battle between the sexes, idealization of one's lover, faith vs. fate and/or a political statement...very effective as straight up, very stylish horror.

When it comes to the sheer artistry of filmmaking, it's an astounding, jaw-dropping feat of furious beauty.

This delirious psychodrama defies classification and will polarize viewers as thoroughly as it did 30 years ago.

In much the same way that Possession blurs and blends genres, it also inextricably entangles the personal and the political.

Uncompromising demented cult oddity.

really Possession is like nothing else - an uncompromising and idiosyncratic vision of the divisions that exist around, between and within us all.

Its failures would be almost invisible if its successes weren't so excellent.

Are the characters even real? I don't know, and I don't care. Possession is an ostentatious, absurd waterfall of beauty and horror and I let it wash over me.