Over the past few years, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession has been put on the internet’s radar as a morbid curiosity. You can find the film on endless ‘most disturbing movies ever made’ iceberg lists that the algorithm favours; the gruesome, uncanny moments being perfect visuals for clickable thumbnails. And then there is Anna (Isabelle Adjani) thrashing around in oversized Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses, becoming the ‘weird girl’ Halloween costume of recent years. Screenshots of her mid-scream and covered in blood have become an essential Instagram grid post for the girl who’s going through it. But beyond fear and social media, it’s the film’s dedication to raw emotion that makes it stand out in our apathetic time.
Adjani’s unique performance, inspired by Jerzy Grotowski, the influential Polish theatre director whose approach to performance tested the limits of physical endurance and “exploited the intimacy of live theatre to confront the audience directly,” can feel alien in a time when we are so used to seeing perfection, even when it is meant to be ugly. The source of her palpable rage is open to interpretation: the loss of identity after motherhood, falling out of love, the visceral pain of divorce. While these themes are evergreen, it is Possession’s collapse of communication which makes it stand out more than ever 45 years later. Anna and Mark (Sam Neill), a young married couple with a son living in West Berlin, reach otherworldly neurotic heights as they go in circles, figuratively and literally: arguments that sound like unsolvable riddles, chasing one another around identical bare streets, and doppelgangers that take the narrative even further from reality.
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Whilst we watch Anna and Mark’s relationship crumble, we repeatedly see the Berlin Wall looming around them. The film opens with the graffiti, “DIE MAUER MUß WEG” (“The Wall Must Go”), and ends with real guards on the Wall peering into the camera through binoculars. Watching Possession today, it’s hard not to see the film as a mirror. Like Anna and Mark, we must go about our lives being watched in a pressurised, paranoid, and confused reality, where online censorship is disguised as a safety act, and AI is causing people to be wrongly jailed. Indeed, as Adam Curtis puts it, “we live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control.” This external chaos seeps into the home, often without us even realising, as we’re left wondering why a loved one in front of us is now a stranger, and how a life that should have been simple came to resemble a haunted house at a theme park.
A few hours of doomscrolling can make you want to throw yourself around an empty subway, screaming and throwing up. With the average day in 2026 including smiling for the Flock cameras and giving websites your passport details that will be leaked onto 4chan in a few months, watching Possession is relatable and cathartic. We can live vicariously through Anna’s thrashing and screaming, her performance a convincing choreography of suffocation. Possession is a rare piece of media that successfully conveys the surreal, absurd terror that has crept into everyday life over the past 20 years. Films like The Social Network and Ingrid Goes West no longer cut it when there’s an AI boyfriend epidemic; instead, the stories we crave ought to be as unbelievable as the one we are living in. Being plugged in to a constant stream of disturbing, hyperreal content has unsurprisingly desensitised us. Anna and Mark’s doppelgangers, cold and complacent, are eerie parallels to our own online personas – curated versions of ourselves that must follow terms and conditions in order to exist convincingly, divorced from real human experience in their deliberate and fine-tuned makeup.
