All of this bizarreness is considerably aided by director Andrzej Zulawski’s demented visual style. Zulawski seems only ever to be able to direct at a manically deranged pace or in vacuously dull meaningful pauses. The camera continuously wanders in and out of rooms in long tracking shots and there are weird disjointed lapses between shots. The streets, trains, cafes and bars of West Berlin (where the film was shot) seem to be completely empty of people. The film is lit in a washed-out blue light and the characters all painted in white-face – along with the hysterically shrieked performances of both Neill and Adjani the film seems more like kabuki theatre colliding with European art house cinema at its most willfully pretentious. Somehow in all of this Adjani was awarded the Palm D’Or for Best Actress Award at Cannes that year for the role. Certainly she should be celebrated for being able to attain an entire film at the histrionic pitch of a near-nervous breakdown – but is it a great performance?

Zulawski feels like he has much he wants to say. Symbolism – The Berlin Wall representing divisions, everybody seeks perfected clone versions of the other – often looms as though he is pointing a big arrow at it. But what he is really trying to make a film about is not at all clear – marriage breakup? an out-and-out horror film? monsters from the Id? There is so much going on that everything eventually collapses into symbolic overkill, not to mention total narrative incoherence. You can draw nominal similarities to David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) which featured a husband trying to rescue his estranged wife from a psychotherapeutic technique that allowed her to express herself by physically giving birth to monsters. Possession could almost be a subjective, internalized Brood – one that comes sans the explaining rationale of pschyotherapeutic techniques. Indeed Possession almost seems to inhabit the same kind of surreal interior territory as Polanski’s mental breakdown film Repulsion (1965) – it seems to be a subjective work from the inside of the emotional traumas of separation. But if that is what it is, Zulawski gives us no handholds. Everybody in the film seems totally nuts and it is never clear whose emotional trauma we are seeing – Neill’s or Adjani’s. That said there is definitely a small cult that regards this as a minor masterpiece. Even Sam Neill called this the favourite among his films.

The international version of the film runs to 127 minutes, the US distributor cut 45 minutes out and attempted to rearrange scenes in a vain attempt to provide greater clarity. It didn’t help. The original US cinematic release was promoted with free barf bags; in the UK the film was declared a video nasty and banned.

Ukranian-born, Polish-based director Zulawski has made a number of other films since, including The Silver Globe (1987), Boris Godunov (1989), My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (1989) and Fidelity (2000). Zulawksi’s one other venture into horror cinema has been The Devil (1988), a historical film set in 19th Century Poland that depicts the barbarism of the period with reportedly extremely graphic results.