Sam Neill’s Face Made Possession Work

In Sam Neill’s best-known role as Jurassic Park’s Dr. Alan Grant, he’s an (unlikely) action hero. Though he’s curmudgeonly with a slightly off-putting dislike of children, it’s never in doubt that he’s the good guy. But remembering Neill, who died on Monday at 78, solely for Jurassic Park does a disservice to his strengths as an actor. For much of his career, he played complicated men with ambiguous motives. He could turn a character from sympathetic to sinister with the slightest movement of his mouth or eyebrows. And nowhere was that ability used to such immortal effect as in one of his earliest roles, playing a Cold War–era spy cuckolded by a tentacle monster.

At the beginning of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, Mark (Neill) has just returned home from a mission. He gets out of a taxi in front of his West Berlin apartment building and puts down his bags as if expecting a hug from his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani). She just stares at him, so he picks his bags up again. It becomes clear that she already told him on the phone that things are over between them. Later, lying naked in bed, the two discuss their marriage. They both confirm that they haven’t had affairs, but Mark soon learns that was a lie. Anna has been sleeping with a man named Heinrich. The knowledge unglues Mark.

Much has been made of Adjani’s supremely physical performance, which won her Best Actress at the film’s Cannes premiere. The praise is justified — Anna’s subway-miscarriage scene is one of the most iconic in horror. But Possession is a movie about the breakdown of a marriage (Żuławski reportedly called it “a very true-to-life autobiographical story”), and both parties are breaking down spectacularly.

While Anna’s unraveling is conveyed in her impressive flailing and shrieks, Mark’s comes through more subtly. When he first learns of Anna’s betrayal, he asks her about it over the phone. The camera closes in on Neill as he asks her if she slept with him, if she liked it, then if she liked it more than with him. As she answers “yes” each time, his face moves from sadness to anger, then to something more menacing when she confirms Heinrich was a better lover. He asks her to meet him at a café, where he confronts her about the affair. She arrives to find him staring straight ahead, white-knuckling the sides of the table. Before a word is spoken, Neill positions Mark as someone about to snap, putting Anna — and the viewer — on edge. Though the scene ends with Mark chasing Anna around the café throwing chairs, the contempt in his eyes when he finally looks at her is more chilling than the violence. 

Some of Neill’s other famous horror roles called on him to embody a wild-eyed insanity, as he did in Event Horizon and In the Mouth of Madness. But it’s in Possession that he most frighteningly shape-shifts, going from pitiful to monstrous in a second. When arguing about Heinrich with Anna, Neill’s face scrunches up as he speeds through emotions. Then Anna finally slaps him, and his face goes still but not blank. There’s a slight curve to his lips, a manic glint in his eye. It’s terrifying, even before he asks her to do it again, then hits Anna back so hard she starts drooling blood. Mark soon devolves into pure, malevolent glee when Heinrich begs Mark to tell him where to find Anna. “You misuse me!” Heinrich cries at Mark, who calmly smiles and raises his eyebrows with a mixture of amusement and hatred. Now that someone else has been jilted by Anna, he’s started to enjoy it.

As it turns out, Anna’s new lover is a tentacled monster. The back half of the film unquestioningly belongs to Adjani, as she so memorably embodies Anna’s descent into madness and begins acting monstrously herself. She kills both detectives tailing her, then her friend Margit. In between murders, she holds a ballet student in a painful position for so long that the girl runs out of class crying. When Mark walks in on a frenzied Anna packing up her things, Neill’s expression once again freezes. This time, though, it’s with an eerie calmness in contrast with Anna’s histrionics. It’s in this scene that we get the famous subway miscarriage in flashback. It’s an incredible sequence. And part of what makes Adjani’s performance so effective is how Neill’s concentrates and amplifies it. Early on in the film, he’s an aggressor, making her seem fragile. From this point on, he acts as her mirror, flat but with endless depths. They work together like alcohol and opioids, increasing each other’s potency to dangerous effect. 

There are echoes of Anna and Mark’s dynamic in this year’s horror hit Obsession. That movie inspired a lot of discourse around what abusive relationships look like, with most of the conversation centering around the fact that the lead character literally “made” his girlfriend crazy by wishing that she loved him more than anything in the world. That wish is implicit in Possession; Mark becomes obsessed with the idea that Anna liked sleeping with Heinrich more than him. Is it fair to say that Mark “made” Anna go crazy through emotional and physical abuse? Possession defies discourse; it’s too enigmatic for that. But with nothing more than a cocked eyebrow, Neill still gave us plenty to talk about.