One of my all-time favorites ways I’ve ever been introduced to a movie is also my best instance of going in to blind to a work of pop culture. I spent a solid number of years on a Twin Cities-based message board in the 2000s, a good way for me to keep up with friends after I had moved to New York. One day after a spirited debate about film, one of my fellow posters asked me for my address, and roughly a week later I discovered a small package in the mail: It was a burned copy of a DVD-R, and the only communication included was a sticky note attached to it from him, simply saying, “Prepare to have your mind blown.” That night, I popped the disc in, hit play, and that’s how I first encountered Possession, the bizarre and fascinating 1981 film from the late Polish auteur . In its broadest terms, it’s a film about the fracturing of a marriage; but when it comes to the particulars, it is through-the-looking-glass levels of unclassifiable, what our own as a film in which “the game is to keep as many genres and meanings in play as possible,” and all of which I firmly believe is best served by going in cold. Don’t even watch the above trailer. [Alex McLevy]
