Hysterical, bodily, transgressive arthouse that shares the Vienna Actionist instinct for the abject. A marriage collapse told as body-horror and metamorphosis, filmed in a divided Berlin.
Why the Bureau files it. Andrzej Żuławski drives performance past the point of control into something closer to the Actionist mode than to conventional acting: Isabelle Adjani's subway breakdown is bodily extremity staged as spectacle, the body in revolt against itself. The tradition's interest in transgression and the abject, the line that runs from Viennese Actionism through the first-wave performance work, finds a cinematic match here in the film's refusal to keep the body decorous.
Shot in West Berlin against the Wall, the film makes the divided city a structural fact rather than a backdrop. The doubling that runs through the story, the second self, the thing in the apartment, rhymes with the split that the EBM and industrial scenes read into Cold War Berlin itself. The setting is the same psychic territory the Berlin tradition worked, filmed at the moment that territory was most charged.
Possession belongs to no tradition figure and was scored conventionally by Andrzej Korzyński, so the Bureau files it for sensibility rather than personnel. What it shares is the instinct: extremity as method, the body as the site where meaning is forced to the surface, the refusal of restraint that the transgressive end of the tradition treats as a first principle.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.