The underseen classic is going to be revived by director Parker Finn.
Thanks to the critical and financial success of Smile, director Parker Finn has been inundated with a number of compelling offers for his next projects, with The Hollywood Reporter confirming that he aims to tackle the psychotronic horror movie Possession. Finn isn’t alone on his mission to revive the Andrzej Żuławski film starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, as Robert Pattinson is also on board the project, though he is currently only attached as a producer and his role as an actor is yet to be confirmed. Finn will be writing and directing the new take on the project.
The original movie focuses on Mark (Sam Neill), a spy who returns home to his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and young son Bob (Michael Hogben) and finds that their relationship has all but disintegrated. Mark hires an investigator to follow Anna and discovers that part of their marriage’s dissolution is due to another relationship she has developed. However, the nature of that relationship is what fully plunges audiences into an entirely unhinged realm, the likes of which almost defy description.
Upon the film’s initial release in Europe, it was deemed one of the “video nasties” and was largely censored across the continent. When it finally made its way to the United States, more than 40 minutes were cut and it was released with an 81-minute run time. In 2000, the film finally earned an uncut release on VHS and DVD, though it would take more than a decade for the movie to earn an HD upgrade. In the mid-2010s, the movie’s Blu-ray debut made the experience more accessible to audiences, while it would go on to earn a 4K release in 2021.
Possession has taken on a mythical quality over the years, due in large part to how difficult it was to see the movie for more than 30 years. When unsuspecting audiences finally witnessed the experience, they were treated to a grotesque and nightmarish journey, with the emotional and monstrous terrors unfolding on-screen mirroring Żuławski’s own struggles at the time, as he developed the film while going through a divorce. The film’s accessibility to viewers in recent years has seen it influence a number of other filmmakers, with both Immaculate director Michael Mohan and The First Omen director Arkasha Stevenson citing the movie as a source of their inspiration.
Having starred in the massively successful Twilight franchise and The Batman, Pattinson has made it a habit of collaborating with boundary-pushing filmmakers who deliver uncompromising narratives. While many fans might know him for his commercial successes, genre fans also admire his work in projects like David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Claire Denis’s High Life, Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, and the upcoming Mickey 17 from Parasite‘s Bong Joon-ho.
Stay tuned for updates on Possession.
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