The plot obliquely follows the relationship between an international spy (Sam Neill) and his wife (Isabelle Adjani), who begins exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking for a divorce.

While not commercially successful either in Europe or in the United States, with the latter only receiving a heavily edited cut on its initial release, the film eventually acquired cult status and has been more positively appraised in later years.

Mark is a spy who returns home to West Berlin from an espionage mission to find that his wife, Anna, wants a divorce.

The next day, Mark meets Bob's teacher, Helen; she inexplicably looks identical to Anna but with green eyes—Mark visits and fights Heinrich, who beats him.

Heinrich visits Anna at the second apartment and is shocked to discover the creature in the bedroom, as well as a collection of dismembered body parts in her refrigerator.

[10][11][12][13] As J. Hoberman notes: A number of critics deny the creature with tentacles exists within physical reality: it may be a reflection of Anna's psychosis; the product of Mark's inflamed consciousness, unable to accept his wife's betrayal;[15] or a kind of revenge of the director traumatized by his own divorce from his ex-wife.

[10][17] As in the case of The Devil, the director placed political subtext under the layer of expressive horror after deliberately choosing Berlin as it was the least remote point from Poland and other countries of the European socialist bloc.

Żuławski recalled how he 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 left him alone for several hours – this scene was directly reflected in Possession.

[21] A year and a half later, following the authorities' halting of work on the film On the Silver Globe in 1978, the director faced a de facto ban and was forced to leave Poland.

After an unsuccessful attempt to start a career in Hollywood (released in 1978, Walter Hill's The Driver failed at the box office), Adjani decided to return to European cinema.

However, Adjani's management company turned down the offer, and the filmmakers chose the next candidate Judy Davis, whose work in the film My Brilliant Career (1979) impressed Żuławski.

[25] Time Out magazine compared the behavior of her character to the actions of "a dervish of unrestrained emotion and pure sexual terror".

[2][28] The "surrealist, clean quality" Żuławski wanted for the film was aided by the Steadicam work of camera operator Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz and Bruno Nuytten's cinematography and lighting.

[23] Carlo Rambaldi, a famed Italian special effects artist and the creator of the Alien animatronic head, assisted in creating the tentacle creature featured in the film.

[10][12] On American screens, it came out in a heavily edited 81-minute cut version from Limelight International Films on the eve of Halloween, October 28th, 1983,[32] having lost more than a third of its runtime;[33] the distributor turned Possession into an eccentric body horror, almost completely eliminating the main theme of the painful breakdown of marriage.

[14][11] A new 4K restoration of the film by Metrograph premiered in United States at Fantastic Fest in September 2021 and expanded nationwide on October 15.

[4][3] Although the film was banned from distribution in the United Kingdom, it was later released uncut on VHS and DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay Entertainment.

[2] Derek Malcolm of The Guardian stated that, while Żuławski displayed talent and the special effects were unforgettable, the film itself was far too serious for its own good.

[37] Dennis Schwartz from Ozus' World Movie Reviews gave the film a grade of "C+", calling it "[an] uncompromising demented cult oddity".

[41] The Philadelphia Daily News's Joe Baltake deemed the film a "boringly camp-elegante attempt by a group of reputable French, German and Polish filmmakers" and assessed Adjani's performance as "babbling, incoherent yet arresting".

Possession may be the only film in existence which is itself mad: unpredictable, horrific, its moments of terrifying lucidity only serving to highlight the staggering derangement at its core.

"[5] Similarly, Slant Magazine's Budd Wilkins gave the film 4/4 stars, saying that "Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani's exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling.

[47] Michael Brooke of Sight & Sound commented in 2011, "Although it's easy to see why it was pigeonholed as a horror film, its first half presents what is still one of the most viscerally vivid portraits of a disintegrating relationship yet committed to film, comfortably rivalling Lars von Trier's Antichrist, David Cronenberg's The Brood and Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

"[10] Reviewing the Blu-ray release of the film in 2013, Michael Dodd of Bring The Noise was similarly impressed with what he called "an intense exploration of marital breakdown".

[48] Reviewing the film's Blu-ray release, Andrew Pollard of the British magazine Starburst rated the film eight out of ten stars, calling it "a visceral, violent, erratic and piercing effort that pokes and prods its audience any chance it gets"; Pollard would also praise the performances of Adjani and Neill, practical effects and unsettling tone.

Its consensus reads, "Blending genres as effectively as it subverts expectations, Possession uses powerful acting and disquieting imagery to grapple with complex themes.

[52] The music video for Massive Attack's "Voodoo in My Blood" (2016) pays homage to the subway scene, with Rosamund Pike wearing a maxi-dress and dancing wildly in a pedestrian underpass.