Mark is dead and so is Anna. Bob knew his father and mother were dead. So, when the 'creature' - looking like Mark - com
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Possession
Lenore_Karina — 14 years ago(October 04, 2011 12:22 PM)
Mark is dead and so is Anna. Bob knew his father and mother were dead. So, when the 'creature' - looking like Mark - comes to Helen's house, Bob freaks out and drowned himself. Somehow, Helen seems like she's in a happy trance.
What does it symbolise? I couldn't grasp the meaning of it. What is this creature supposed to be?
This might be far fetched, but, I had a hunch that Anna was long gone with her mind, so somehow Helen replaced her living hope. And then, in the process, 'Mark' was created to replace the deteriorating real Mark. And the creature symbolizes the changes in both parents, which in the end, affected Bob.
If you come one step closer, I'll murder you with this saucepan! -
streepcotillardfan — 14 years ago(October 18, 2011 10:23 AM)
This is truly the most mind boggling movie I've ever seen. Didn't understand it at all. But hats off to Isabelle Adjani. What an emotionally tiring shoot that must of been!
"I am a dreamer. Seriously, Im living on another planet." - Eva Green -
deanowest — 14 years ago(March 04, 2012 11:18 AM)
My wife thought that each spouse created his/her own ideal mate. the husband may have created his in the opening hotel room freakout, but was some how unaware of it.and the wife in her ugly apartment. the original couple dies and the ideals are left together.
I don't know if she is right, but it was an interesting idea.
Dictated, but not read. -
sabenge — 13 years ago(May 17, 2012 07:50 AM)
I thought the same thing. The tentacle monster seemed like unrelenting masculinity while the schoolteacher seemed to represent caring and nurturing. I'm sure there was more to it than that, though. At least, I hope there is.
http://infinityburst.wordpress.com/ -
Bonehead-XL — 13 years ago(April 04, 2012 08:11 PM)
I'm getting some vague Lovecraftian overtones from ending, and not just because of the tentacle. The way I see it, some thing, some malevolent being, crossed over fully into our world, taking on the appearance of a man. That's why the bullets seem to pass through him, why the New Mark has such a different attitude. And then, at the very end there, when you hear bombs dropping and everything gets so dark, it really feels like an end-of-the-world scenario. That very bad things have crossed over into our world now. (That final image, of Sam Neil pushing against the green glass door, even that seems to visually suggests forces pushing from one world into the next.) If a Lovecraftian element was indeed intended, it would certainly explain why everyone was acting so crazy throughout the movie.
Even then, that's only a small fraction of the pie. There's so much stuff going on in this film, so many different ways to interpret everything. Obviously a lot of it is about divorce and the end of the relationship. There's something in there about the duality of women, the Virgin and the Whore dynamic. There's something in there about how the end of the relationship affect children (My best guess for what Bob drowning himself has to do with anything) and self-destructive relationship. Some of it is probably meaningless too, like that extended scene of Anna torturing the one girl in ballet class. That seems to be there just to make the audience (more) uncomfortable. What a supremely odd film. I think I liked it though. It's certainly not a dumb exploitation movie, like it's sometime accused of being. You could make a case for it being overwrought Eurotrash, but there's definitely something going on here. -
soo_z_g — 13 years ago(May 15, 2012 02:01 PM)
I am a person who is generally explaining movies to other people, but after I saw this one, I found myself asking others for explanations, so I, in no way, think I understand this film as a whole. But I've been reading and trying to make sense of it, and I must wholeheartedly disagree with you that the ballet scene had no meaning in the overall meaning of the film. The first time we see Anna in the film, upon Mark's return, she has obviously already lost her grip on reality. She's so distraught she's unable to express to her husband what she wants or feels. We see virtually nothing else about her past life before she lost her mind EXCEPT the ballet scene, which reads volumes into the kind of perfectionist she was for herself, and the kind of perfection she expected from others. She had been a person who pushed herself to the limits of physical exertion and expected the same kind of devotion from others. Many artists struggle with the difficulty of their creative drive balanced with a personal life (The Red Shoes, for example). Most likely, she felt she gave up part of her professional life in becoming a mother. I think we also have to assume, although there's really nothing concrete to back this up, that she has HUGE abandonment issues since she fell apart when her husband was away for a protracted period of time. In the ballet scene, she is so strong, but I'm guessing she derived that strength from the security of her relationship with her husband and most likely her devotion to her religion (implied by the scene in the church). When she felt abandoned because her husband was gone and she took a lover, she leaned on the lover for support/security, but her guilt over her infidelity and the weakness of her flesh needing sexual satisfaction, which went against her religious convictions, inevitably leads to her madness and her hatred for herself and the husband who left her. The fact that her husband left her for a job, and not for another woman, is immaterial to her. He left her alone to be mother and father to their child. He left her without a sexual partner. Maybe she thought she could handle it, but a perfectionist who is unable to achieve perfection is inevitably bound to crumble.
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ibbi — 13 years ago(June 04, 2012 08:07 AM)
^I think that's certainly a very big part of it. She does want everything to be absolutely perfect, we see that in this scene, and it helps to go some way towards understanding her better. Understanding why she wasn't happy, why she had to have that 'perfect' soulless representation of Mark rather than the actual one that comes with all the complications of real life.