Written by Ava Bibb

Amongst the romcoms and dramas, some of us may be becoming tired with the traditional Valentine’s Day film. While you could settle down under candlelight and chocolates to watch a meet-cute for the hundredth time, I’d suggest that this Valentine’s Day we could look at anti-valentine films. These films don’t seek to reassure us that love conquers all, instead they interrogate and complicate romance. These are films about breakups, obsession, miscommunication and emotional volatility. They don’t reject romance outright but simply refuse to polish it.

Which is how we arrive at Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 fever dream Possession, a film that on paper is about a couple separating. However, in practice, it’s about jealousy, identity, desire, espionage, and an affair with a tangible, gooey, tentacled entity down the street. The film involves the work of special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, and his contribution is so far removed, both in looks and temperament, from E.T., the character he presented to the world the very next year, that it seems impossible they both came from the same person. The film is uncomfortable, disturbing and unhinged yet, in its own way, is one of the rawest and emotionally honest depictions of marital relationships ever put to screen. Valentine’s Day tends to frame love as something glossy and complete. Possession is interested in the opposite. If you’re even a little tired of chocolates and candlelight, it’s a surprisingly fitting choice.

At its core, beneath the espionage, hysteria and monster in the apartment, Possession is a love story or at least a film about love breaking down. Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) are in the middle of a messy separation, neither acting particularly mentally stable. There is jealousy, there is obsession and there is longing so intense it curdles into something feral. What makes the film perversely perfect for an alternate Valentine’s film is how emotionally intense it is. This isn’t the calm, articulate dissolution of Marriage Story or the eloquent debates in Before Midnight. The fights in the film are circular, volatile and desperate, often resulting in bloody violence and mental deterioration. Valentine’s Day tends to celebrate love at its most photogenic, and if those picturesque depictions aren’t for you than Possession presents a love that is obsessive and suffocating, it is hard to tell where one character starts and the other begins. Their love is heightened and occasionally absurd but uncomfortably real.

Conventional rom coms promise closure, all is forgiven, everyone is with who they belong, and the viewers are gifted the cathartic kiss in the rain they switched the film on for. Here, love is not particularly real but organised and tidy.  In Possession, there is not this tidy resolution or sudden clarity. Instead, there is emotional whiplash and vague misunderstandings. Mark and Anna barely understand themselves let alone each other, their love is destabilising and disturbing, yet this is part of the appeal. The film can be seen as refreshing in how love is not neatly defined as in many traditional romance films, which makes it ideal viewing for a certain kind of Valentine’s cynic. This is a film that rewards strong opinions and nervous laughter. The scenes where Mark and Anna tear into each other are so raw and ferocious that you feel like you’ve wandered into a private fight, something not meant for an audience. And yet they’re so gripping, so emotionally charged, that looking away isn’t an option. This is largely down to the masterclass in horror performance from both Niel and Adjani. In the crowning performance of her career to date Adjani demands the viewer’s attention; it’s intense, tragic and terrifying. As fed-up wife and mother turned mad monster lover, she takes us painfully close to the edges of actual insanity, drifting between hysteria, malevolence and brokenness. Nothing in cinema quite matches her animalistic physicality and all-out commitment in Possession’s infamous subway sequence.

Maybe the real appeal of watching Possession on Valentine’s Day is that it refuses to lie to you. It doesn’t smooth over the sharp edges or rush toward reassurance. It lets love be irrational, embarrassing and overwhelming. Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be all candlelight and certainty. It can also be a night for the strange, the cathartic, the slightly unhinged. And if you’re going to spend the evening watching love unravel, you may as well watch it do so spectacularly.