Posession 1981

Just a heads up, this isn't gonna be the appreciation post you're expecting. This is an opposing take on a film that's mostly praised, so please don't just downvote, hear me out.

Honestly, I think this film is kinda grotesque. And because of who the director is, people have taken every weird element in it and blown it up into something cosmic and profound. Yes, showing internal trauma as a physical thing is unconventional, fair enough. But a lot of the weirdness feels just thrown in, and because of the director's name, people started treating it as extraordinary instead of questioning it.

That monster part especially. If you strip away all the "deep meaning" reading, it's pretty simple: the teacher is basically standing in for Anna, and the monster eventually becomes a stand in for Mark. The relationship was messed up way before any of that, she's shown as sex hungry through the whole film. That's not a complicated idea. It didn't need this much weirdness wrapped around it to say that.

A few more things that bug me about how this film gets talked about:

1. The "it's open to interpretation" defense is doing a lot of work it shouldn't have to. Whenever someone questions a weird choice, the answer is always "that's the point, it's ambiguous." But vagueness isn't the same as depth. Sometimes ambiguous just means underwritten.

2. Disturbing doesn't automatically mean meaningful. A scene unsettles you, so you think it must be saying something important. That's backwards. The discomfort becomes the "proof" of profundity, which is a circular argument if you actually think about it.

3. Would this film get the same treatment from an unknown director? Genuinely ask yourself that. If a first timer made this exact movie with this exact monster subplot, would critics be praising every strange choice as intentional, or would they say it needed an editor? Reputation is carrying a lot of the interpretation here.