REVIEW: Possession: Dreams of Suffering and Sanity by Chris Kelso

Kelso’s solid and incisive interpretations allow for the reader’s addendums and refutations, encouraging a more unified, nuanced and comprehensive understanding of this cursed (blessed?) film.

A recent dream: My tongue is a translucent serpent, slithering out of my mouth. Clogging my throat, making it impossible to speak. I’m not aghast at my reptilian tongue but fear the forked one within it will endanger my audience, reduce them to prey. I stuff the colorless coil back between my harmless teeth and wake up.

It’s no coincidence this dream (nightmare?) emerged after repeat readings of Chris Kelso’s Possession: Dreams of Suffering and Sanity. Kelso’s slim yet potent interrogation of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult film, Possession, is a hypnotic blend of oblique autobiography and scholarly critique. From Kafka to Kristeva, his varied literary and philosophical sources result in a prismatic critical lens, offering multiple interpretations that feel as enigmatic and elusive as the movie itself. Even with the inclusion of interviews with the film crew, the film’s meaning only becomes more muddled and mythic. Do not misunderstand: This is to Kelso’s credit.

In his introduction, he delineates Possession as existing “on the narrow fringes of the creative consciousness” and then seeping into “our private dreams.” I immediately recognized Kelso as kindred when reading this. He understands the film’s metaphysical power, its terrifying mysteries. Like me, he is haunted by it. I can trust him. I can commiserate and commune and communicate my own personal readings conflated with analysis in half-born and inarticulate ways. I can speak with a forked tongue without shame or retaliation.

In 2011, I watched Possession for the first time. Likely, the same shitty YouTube upload that Kelso discovered. I was 31 and living with my long-term beau—not yet married but certainly skeptical of matrimony’s banal and insidious oppression. Avoiding spoilers, the film takes an unflinching look at divorce through supernatural tropes and psychosexual conflict so honest it’ll make your soul squirm. It is beyond language and deeply visceral. It’s a Polish film that takes place in West Berlin with French and Kiwi actors. As Kelso brilliantly puts it, Possession is a “fascinating mongrel of a movie.”

As the credits rolled, I caught the reflection of a bewildered and trembling mess of a woman on my laptop screen. I felt seen, validated, troubled, vindicated. I wholly identified with Isabelle Adjani’s “Anna,” an unhinged mother and housewife destroying all she’s known and loved for a disgusting and amorphous sense of freedom. It was like seeing myself on Zoom as I actually appeared to others: gesticulating wildly, laughing maniacally, an asymmetrical and childish beast. If you haven’t experienced Possession, I encourage you to watch it now. If you’re lazy or disinterested, perhaps this review and/or Kelso’s book will convince you otherwise.

I aim for this review to be a conversation between reader and author, less fraught and catastrophic than the exchanges between Anna and her husband, Mark (Sam Neill), but just as impactful in revealing what lies on the other side of the wall. If Mark and Anna are “divided, unable to communicate,” then Kelso’s book offers his readers a chance for connection, to respond and flesh out the natural gaps that stem from the need to “locate those tenuous connections between art that I love and my own simple existence.”

Kelso’s cogent film analysis is peppered with brief scenes from his own life depicting abjection in the workplace (he’s a teacher), childhood memories, and an evasive recounting of “romantic victimhood” while in a relationship with a woman he refers to as “X.” Toward the end of the book, Kelso discloses that he is someone who “cannot remove themselves from the art they create and consume.” More personal anecdotes threaded throughout each chapter would not only have strengthened this argument, but also granted readers access into the vulnerable and enraptured gaze of Kelso. We would have better seen the movie through his haunted mind, plagued by the “ghosts of (his) own fraught romantic past.” Perhaps he thought it too self-indulgent to expand the autobiographical aspects or feared immediate resurrection of the suffering he’s tried to avoid. Whatever the case, the intermittent and vague recollections of his past begged for further investigation and development.

Kelso refers to Possession as a “male nightmare,” a warranted perspective that never occurred to me. He admits to using Mark as an avatar to explore his own romantic torture and mortification. Focused almost entirely on Anna’s journey, I viewed the film as “female fantasy.” Kelso states, “The film felt like a warning.” To me, it felt like an affirmation; the movie whispering, “Behold the beauty of inarticulate and animal suffering.” Kelso notes he’s spent most of his life hiding from suffering, drawing another parallel between himself and Mark. When reading this, I scoffed a bit and thought, I never had that privilege. In my girlhood, Plath and Woolf and Chopin spilled the open secret: To suffer is to know womanhood. And sometimes it’s easier to choose death over (as?) transformation. This is why Anna’s bloody and brutal battle within herself is an admirable alternative.

To become monstrous is to become otherworldly, to escape the horrific confines of the mundane. While Kelso concurs, he also argues that the film represents “a very real nightmare. A woman’s revenge.” I do not view Anna as seeking vengeance but rather engaging in the terrifying and painful process of self-actualization. Kelso and I seem to agree that Anna devours the constricting norms of domesticity, but while he thinks she merely expels them, I believe she chews them up and spits them out to birth a new self. It is dirty work. Abject work. The work is monstrous, but she isn’t. Anna is in charge of her own suffering. Her abjection is self-induced labor.

In a few scenes, Anna returns to her marriage, son, and domestic routine. But she’s too far along in the transformation process. She’s shed her maternal role, the skin of decorum, as she twitches and shudders. She must make sense of her essence. Her essence is creature, unfurling and reaching for the new.

To me, this movie is not about fucking an ********. It’s about self-love and self-acceptance—embracing your base and vile nature as something to covet. The irreparable harm you inflict on those you love while seeking your truest nature cannot be avoided. Even so, Anna turns to god, eyes upward and pleading, because it’s difficult being her own god. Women are not socialized to be gods, to be sure of their needs or their desires, let alone meet them. Kelso acknowledges this but sees it as a fall from grace rather than a turning toward it. It is likely both.

From the use of doubles to the Berlin Wall, duality is, undeniably, a core theme in Zulawski’s film. Gray permeates the film’s color palette. Nothing is black and white. It’s all a dreary mess of strife and collision. The spectre of co-dependency haunts each frame. Mark and Anna are complementary forces of chaos. Therefore, my subconscious approached Kelso’s book through a duality framework, i.e., “This is valid, but it’s also valid that…” Kelso’s solid and incisive interpretations allow for the reader’s addenda and refutations, encouraging a more unified, nuanced, and comprehensive understanding of this cursed (blessed?) film.

It isn’t surprising that there are more words for the things that haunt us than synonyms for death. Possession, both book and film, reminds us that the lingering impressions of our heartbreak/suffering/grief are invaluable. If we can be haunted, we know we’re still alive. And yet, Kelso ends his book with gratitude for healing and wholeness. It’s as if his walls have gone up. I question how much he is still haunted by the film—if he is at all. For such a rich and complex read of a complicated film, it’s disappointing to see Kelso offer such a tidy and anemic resolution, to leave all the darkness he so thoughtfully explores behind. But maybe that’s the point. He’s leaving it there for us to fuck around with and find out. He’s regained his sanity. It’s up to us to keep the dream of suffering alive.

**Kelso recommends songs for each chapter in Possession: Dreams of Suffering and Sanity (they’re all bangers I’ve had in regular rotation for years). Here are some options for songs to listen to while reading this review: This Woman’s Work—Kate Bush, Driven Like the Snow—Sisters of Mercy, Lofticries—Purity Ring