POSSESSION: Women In Film Fest

Andrzej Żuławski’s POSSESSION presents the breakdown of a relationship as a visceral and destabilising experience that extends beyond psychological realism into the territory of the grotesque and the surreal. Set against the divided landscape of Cold War Berlin, the film uses domestic conflict as a point of entry into broader questions of identity, fragmentation, and control.

Isabelle Adjani’s performance, widely regarded as one of the most extreme in modern cinema, anchors the film’s emotional intensity. Żuławski’s direction amplifies this through a restless visual style, producing a work that resists categorisation and pushes performance toward physical and expressive limits.

Within Women in Film Week, POSSESSION is included for the way it foregrounds performance as a site of rupture. It challenges conventional expectations of emotional representation, allowing female subjectivity to manifest in forms that are excessive, unstable, and difficult to contain. Its significance lies in its refusal of restraint.