Possession Explained | Movie Mastery

Possession Ending Explained

Mark and Anna live in West Berlin

It helps to remember that stories are usually made up of character, plot, and theme. But each story prioritizes those aspects differently. John Wick prioritizes character and plot; theme is secondary. The Raid prioritizes plot; character and theme are secondary. Zone of Interest prioritizes theme; character and plot are secondary. 

In a character-driven story, the emphasis is on the protagonist’s change over time (for better or worse). In a plot-driven story, the emphasis is on action, reaction, and events. And in a theme-driven story, the characters, actions, and events all serve the point being made. 

Something like The Godfather is so powerful because all three aspects work together. It emphasizes Michael’s change over the course of events. It also emphasizes the series of events that bring about the fall of don Vito Corleone and the rise of the family’s new don (Michael). But all this is metaphorical for the American zeitgeist’s shift after World War II. Coppola saw the story being about a loss of the old ways (Vito) and the emergence of a zeitgeist that was far more cutthroat and capitalistic (Michael). 

When you see a movie like Possession that is so off the rails, it helps to start by asking, “Do I think the story focused on character, plot, or theme?” And when the last scene involves a child jumping in a bathtub to drown, the evil doppelganger of a woman’s lover showing up at her door, and the sudden outbreak of World War III…the answer probably isn’t “character” or “plot”. 

So when we have a theme-driven movie, one of the first things to look at is setting. Possession takes place in the early 1980s in Berlin. But Berlin in the early 80s wasn’t Berlin. Germany’s loss in World War II had left not only Berlin but Germany itself divided into East and West. That’s because Western Allies like England, France, and the United States wanted a democratized Germany, while Russia, the eastern-based Ally, wanted a communist government that reflected its values. 

In other words, Berlin represents a city, a country, that had once been united but was now divided. Divorced. And then you realize Mark worked for the West Berlin government. And that Anna’s apartment was as far east as someone could go in West Berlin. To the point where the building was across the street from the Berlin Wall. This was at a time when crossing the wall was mostly illegal. It was unlikely Andrzej Żuławski could have obtained a permit to film on the Eastern portion. So the location of Anna’s apartment is, for all intents and purposes, a representation of East Berlin. 

So Possession is about the messy divorce of these two characters and takes place in a city that was in the midst of a messy divorce. And one character “happens” to be associated with the West and the other “coincidentally” has an apartment that’s essentially in the East. That means we have the recipe for a political allegory. 

Andrzej Żuławski’s background

Some find the background of and commentary from an artist as the be-all end-all in analyzing a work. For example, if Steven Spielberg said Jaws is a metaphor for Alzheimer’s, this camp would accept that explanation as all the proof necessary to conclude that Jaws is a metaphor for Alzheimer’s. 

Others believe in the “death of the author”. That view claims that authorial intent has no bearing on interpretation. The only thing that matters is what’s in the text itself. Especially because so much of art is unconscious. If you watch Spielberg movies, you’ll notice that many of his stories involve the strained relationship between a child and their father. Maybe that was a coincidence, or maybe Spielberg kept telling those stories because of unresolved feelings he himself had. Lo and behold, after decades of making movies around the topic, he finally made the autobiographical film The Fablemans, a movie that details the strained relationship Spielberg had, starting as a kid, with his father. 

To the “death of the author” camp, it doesn’t matter if Spielberg says Jaws is a metaphor for Alzheimer’s because nothing in the story reflects that. It would be different if you had a character with Alzheimer’s and every time they had an episode of memory loss it coincided with a shark attack. Then you have the text-based argument needed for the metaphor. 

Personally, I’m a mix. I think you start with the text, see what’s there, then look for information that supports those conclusions. If that’s author-based background and commentary, cool. For example, the movie The Others seems like it uses its haunted house story as a metaphor for religion. Sure enough, the director confirmed he grew up Catholic then became agnostic so wanted to tell a story about how limited his religious-based upbringing was. The author’s intent matches what we see in the text. 

What happens when we look at Andrzej Żuławski’s background and commentary? Well, Żuławski had, in 1976, a few years before writing and filming Possession, gone through the dissolution of a marriage (to actress Malgorzata Braunek). Apparently there’s a Polish book about Żuławski that confirms that the filmmaker “once returned home late in the evening and found his five-year-old son, Xavier, alone in the apartment, smeared with jam, after his wife [had left the child] alone for several hours” (text from Wikipedia). We see a recreation of that moment in Possession. So Żuławski was very much drawing from real life scenes. 

It would be easy to stop there and say “Okay, so the movie is simply about his divorce. All the political stuff is just you being extra.” But dig further and you discover that Żuławski had lived in Poland for many years. At that time, Poland was, like East Germany, a post-WWII claim by Russia and its communist influence. Imagine how Żuławski felt after he released his second movie, The Devil (1971), and the Polish government banned it. Then, in 1977, a year after his divorce, he tried to make On the Silver Globe, but “when filming was 80% complete, the Polish government ordered the production to be shut down and all the negatives be destroyed.” 

So what does the end of Possession really mean?

I hope at this point you have some trust in my analytical process and abilities, without me having to qualify every conclusion. For the sake of getting you answers, I’m going to go a little more rapid fire. 

• Mark and Anna’s doppelgängers, the meaning of the monster
  • They represent the “idealized” version of one another. Mark wanted Anna to be more demure and sweet, like Helen. While Anna wanted Mark to be confident, cool, and a prolific lover. They become these personifications of what each person in the relationship desired but couldn’t receive from their partner. If Mark and Anna had the qualities of their doppelgängers, they would be “complete”.
    • This also ties to the idea of a Cold War Europe divided between capitalism and communism, democracy and communism. So everything was East and West. And how that extended to someone’s very identity. 
• The deaths of Mark and Anna
  • We’ve talked about how Mark and Anna represent the division of Berlin/Germany/Europe after World War II. Despite their differences, despite the conflict between them, their fates are forever entwined. That’s what we get from Anna shooting herself while on top of Mark and Mark’s fatal jump soon after .
• The Man in the Pink Socks
  • This is a thematic point commenting on the kind of government espionage and oversight that was so prevalent during the Cold War. Like the Polish film ministry that banned The Devil then shut down On the Silver Globe. Mark gives a report on a person of interest. But the person of interest was, it seems, actually one of the people who hired him, who was there, listening to his report. I imagine Żuławski wanted to comment on the absurdity of these kinds of Cold War government agencies. And how often they chased their own tails.
    • The only thing Żuławski says about this guy in the commentary is that the scene on the bridge, when they discuss the dead dog, was a slight spoof of American cinema. Which would probably explain the tone of the following shootout and chase scene. A sudden influx of American cinema may seem strange, even arbitrary, but it fits with the film’s political commentary. The influence of America on Western Europe, on West Berlin, was immense, especially as the free market of West Berlin was on display against the communist economics of the East. To this day, even with the city reunified, the former is economically ahead of the latter. 
• Bob jumps into the tub
  • As Mark the Monster appears at Helen’s apartment, Mark and Anna’s son, Bob, freaks out. He says to not open the door then runs to the bathroom and jumps into the tub to drown.
    • When Mark first returns home at the beginning of the movie, when Mark and Anna are still happily together, we see Bob playing in the tub. He actually makes siren sounds then puts on goggles and “dives” under the water. Then, it seemed childish and adorable. 
    • At the end, there are real sirens, real combat, and Bob doesn’t come up for air.
  • In the director’s commentary, Żuławski about how he was during World War II and how that shaped his worldview. I was born from an Apocalypse. I was born from a city in Poland in 1940 and my sister died from hunger and my mother and my father were the only surviving people from a huge family. I don’t know by what miracle I survived. I was 3 or 4 and a bit stronger than my sister was, certainly. So for me, everything commences, begins with an apocalypse. And I hope it won’t end with an apocalypse for my sons. But I’m a bit pessimistic about it. So it ends with the way it has begun for me. 
    • So Bob’s death is a metaphor for what would happen to the next generation if another World War happened. 
• Mark at the door of Helen’s apartment.
  • Helen is a more innocent version of Anna. While Monster Mark is a more diabolical version of Mark. Żuławski established Monster Mark’s corrupting influence when he arms that girl on the staircase and convinces her to fire on the police. As Monster Mark goes into the light, regular Mark plummets into darkness. It marks this inversion of energy and force. That turns Monster Mark into this Horseman of the Apocalypse.
• The last shot of Helen
  • Monster Mark’s behind Helene’s shoulder, waiting for her to open the door. So he represents this doom that’s just waiting for the opportunity to “walk in”. It’s a feeling that dominated the Cold War decades, when it seemed like nuclear war was a constant, haunting threat. 
  • Helen’s in an all white apartment, in a white dress. There’s a purity, an innocence to the visuals around her. Especially in contrast to Monster Mark in an all black suit.
  • We see flashes of light and dark that play on Helen, similar to the light and dark color contrast in the stairwell where Mark and Anna die. In the commentary, Żuławski said he viewed stairs as a pathway to light. That would explain why he shot the stairwell scene with a ton of light up top and heavy on shadow down below. It also means we should consider the implication of who climbs to the top of the stairs and emerges into the light: Monster Mark.
    • In this case, the darkness of humanity is what emerges into the world. And it heads off to claim the innocent. Hence the implication of a new apocalypse, Bob’s death, and the shadow that ultimately consumes Helen. 

Hopefully that answers your questions about Possession. If any still remain, please ask in the comments! But, hopefully, you have enough context at this point to understand that everything in the movie is essentially thematic, representative of a real concept or emotion. So when Anna puts the carving knife to her throat then Mark does the same to his arm, it’s weird and seemingly inexplicable, but it just represents the insanity that’s part of both divorce and the politics that followed World War II. That’s going to be the answer to pretty much every question you have. 

Bonus: explaining the tunnel scene

The big tunnel scene with Anna, you may be wondering about that, given the context of everything else. Prior to the scene we have two important context pieces. 

There’s the home video of Anna teaching ballet, but it concludes with her kind of torturing one student, an act she justifies by saying “From now on, she’ll know how much righteous anger and sheer will she’s got in her to say: ‘I can do as well, I can be better! I am the best!’ Only in this case can she become a success. Nobody taught me that. That’s why I’m with you. Because you say ‘I’ for me.”  

So Anna’s saying low self-esteem, low standards are why she let herself settle for someone as flawed as Mark. Kind of brutal. 

Then we get the story of the “sisters”. Where Anna says “I recognize the self who has just done something horrible, like a sister I’ve casually met on the street.” That conveys an idea of dissociation, dual identity, the doppelganger that becomes quite literal in the story. She says:

The dialogue tries to explain the scene. “I’m the maker of my own evil” is an abstract line, philosophical. But the tunnel scene makes it literal. Anna was torn between ideas of faith and chance and the result was this existential cancer that the movie turns into the very literal monster that Anna raises in her secret apartment. A monster that becomes the evil version of Mark. And this evil version of Mark brings with him a new apocalypse, what’s essentially World War III. 

You could view Helen as the version of Anna who has both faith and chance. While Anna is someone who lost both. And in losing these ideals, she falls into the third possibility—madness. This is the crux of Żuławski’s statement about marriage and the world. Both work when the person/society can balance the tension between opposing ideas like faith and chance. But it falls apart when the balance is lost. And suddenly the third answer appears—cancer, madness, war. 

So what we witness in the tunnel is a representation of the moment Anna lost faith in her marriage. Which is a metaphor for the tipping point in global, national, and local politics, when balance gives way to chaos. 

What does the title mean?

I just wanted to touch on this real fast, since we’ve talked about all the other stuff. Possession, as a word, refers to a state of ownership. So the title brings up an idea of not only what we possess but that which we don’t possess. Mark no longer possesses Anna. And Russia’s possession of the East Bloc led to the censorship of Żuławski’s art. And then Anna loses possession of faith and madness possesses her. A madness that then spreads to Mark (in the form of his doppelganger). And that madness, at the end, possesses the entire world. 

Cast

• Anna/Helen – Isabelle Adjani
• Mark – Sam Neill
• Bob – Michael Hogben
• Heinrich – Heinz Bennent
• Heinrich’s mother – Johanna Hofer
• Margit – Margit Gluckmeister
• Zimmerman – Shaun Lawton
• Detective – Carl Duering
• Man with the Pink Socks – Maximilian Ruethlein
• Written by – Andrzej Żuławski 
• Directed by – Andrzej Żuławski 

Thanks for reading our explanation of Possession, if you have any questions or thoughts, please share them in the comments!