In the past few years, images of French actress Isabelle Adjani have taken root on the internet. A skilled actress who never had much success in America, the resurgence of Adjani’s popularity in the past few years has centered around specific aesthetics. Stills of her in One Deadly Summer (1983) or Ishtar (1987) aren’t the focus. She has flourished as the internet’s arthouse scream queen — beautiful, horrifying, horrified.
Why do we so badly want to look at Adjani as she thrashes and screams and sobs and bleeds? What do these images provide that we find so fascinating? Adjani, in a blood-drenched white dress, holding the decapitated head of her lover in La Reine Margot (1994). Adjani, skin ashen and lips bloodless in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). But by far, the most popular of these images come from Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession.
Twitter and Tumblr are rich with these images. Her bloodied face adorns blogs, themes, and Twitter profiles. Profile pictures, reaction images, headers. Adjani as Possession’s Anna, blood spewing from her mouth and onto her blue dress. Anna, wide-eyed, a white bandage tied around her neck. Anna in her most famed scene from the film, having a mental, spiritual, and physical breakdown in a Berlin subway station.
Videos and stills of this scene are the most common as Adjani’s performance cast a spell on the internet almost four decades after the film’s release.
Even within the context of the film, the subway scene is difficult to explain or parse. Anna describes it as a miscarriage of faith. Anna, a woman who has suddenly decided to leave her husband, undergoes a deep transformation of self. Possession is a horror film about divorce. Seemingly without a clear motive, she informs her husband Mark (Sam Neill) that she wishes to leave him. What follows is a bewildering two hours of escalating violence, both physical and emotional. Anna and Mark batter each other, make up, self harm, and neglect their young son. Anna disappears for long stretches of time, and neither Mark nor her lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) know where she goes. Something strange and inhuman lurks in the shadows of the film.
One day, some time before the start of the film, Anna goes grocery shopping and enters a church. Gazing at the figure of Christ on the cross reduces her to panicked whimpers. She escapes the church, takes the subway home, and proceeds to have a full-throated breakdown in the station that concludes with her kneeling on the floor, white vomit waterfalling from her mouth as she screams. Blood gushes from her ears and between her legs, pooling together with spilled milk and urine on the floor. Later, she tells Mark, “What I miscarried there was Sister Faith, and what was left was Sister Chance.” There is no further explanation for the deranged scene, just as many things are left unexplained in the film.
Removed from this larger context, the subway scene becomes crystallized as a self-contained expression of horror. Adjani has a talent for portraying emotional desperation, which is exemplified in this single scene. Even if this sequence is removed from its context of the film’s narrative, it doesn’t stop it from gaining new and varied shades of meaning as it proliferates across the internet. As Anna laughs, stumbling through the subway station, her cackles shifting into screams. The station is dark and grimy and the floor shines, but one can’t be sure if it is polished or just greased by the soles of countless commuters. When Anna throws herself onto the floor, already wet with milk from the carton she crushed, it’s hard not to cringe. She doesn’t care, dirtying her blue dress and her black hair. Milk and filth cling to her sheer tights.
It doesn’t matter why she swings her grocery bag and smashes a carton of milk against the wall, or why Anna kneels and bleeds from her ears, so much as it matters that the electricity of her performance strikes something in the viewer. Her gaze is a scalpel, and it cuts to the bone. The internet is enamored with the very idea of an unhinged woman, and Adjani as Anna fits the bill perfectly.
Adjani joins the esteemed company of other internet horror darlings. Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl (2014), Megan Fox as Jennifer Check in Jennifer’s Body ( 2009), and Florence Pugh in Midsommar (2019) come to mind. A detached murderer seeking revenge, a teenage girl gifted the powers of a demon, a traumatized young woman ensnared into a cult. Often, images of these women show their joy in violence or their shrewd gaze. But, Adjani does neither.
If Gone Girl’s Amy has gained the status of internet idol for her coldness, her skilled manipulation, her perfectly quotable monologue, then Possession’s Anna is on the opposite end of the spectrum. She is the unhinged woman who cannot find the words. She laughs, she screams, she pisses and vomits and bleeds. Amy may be violent, but she is an entirely intellectual creature. All of her violence is rationalized and calculated down to the smallest modicum of hate. Images of Anna speak to something deep-rooted and primal. There’s no explaining away her behavior — it is emotion turned physical. Watching her scream and bleed may be cathartic, or it may provide something that many recognize themselves in. Sometimes you just want to lose your shit and watching Adjani lose hers will have to do. Or maybe you have lost your shit before, and it felt the way that subway scene looks. Pain and desperation are not neat and tidy affairs. The fluids spewing from her body are extensions of what we can see plainly on her face. It is a remarkable performance — one that allegedly had a profound effect on Adjani’s mental and physical health.
Adjani won two Best Actress awards for her work in Possession: one at Cannes Film Festival, and the other at the Cesar Awards. The first American release of the film was edited down by almost 40 minutes, leaving an already strange film incoherent. Now, with Adjani’s face adorning all kinds of social media pages, both the original cut of Possession and Adjani’s work as an actress are getting the recognition they deserve. The film can be hard to get a hold of but is well worth watching for Adjani’s monumental performance.
