GRADE: 9
A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Country: France | West Germany
THOUGHTS:
A spy returns home from a mission to find his wife suddenly seeking a divorce. And then all hell breaks loose for the next hour and forty-five minutes. An experiment in sustained disorientation, it’s not hard to see how some might have seen this film, at the time, as a confused muddle of disparate elements—body horror, psychological horror, Satanic possession story, divorce drama, and even elements of espionage film. But what ties it together is a fierce commitment on part of the cast and the director to imbue the movie with a nightmarish emotional intensity and oblique logic that defies easy analysis. Everything and everyone in the film seem to succumb to the same insanity at the same time: the escalating jealousy, madness and violence of the husband and wife holds the focus, but all around them, the characters in the world they’re trapped in are equally enigmatic and dreamlike. Doppelgangers appear as “perfected” versions of the man and woman, but their chilly restraint seems to negate any alternative, hopeful possibilities to the dismal state their counterparts are possessed by. Shot in West Germany at a time when the Wall was still standing, the film has a political subtext that lends it additional weight.
Adjani’s performance is jaw-dropping. She holds nothing back in making the hysteria utterly palpable, but manages to never tip over into the purely grotesque. The miscarriage sequence in the subway station is one of the greatest horror movie sequences ever shot, for my money.