GRADE: C

When you see an internationally acclaimed actress play a hysterical freak who makes love to her own monstrous, tentacled offspring when she's not vomiting and bleeding all over herself, you might take it as a sign that her career is over. But in the case of Isabelle Adjani, who was seen doing just those things not long after her appearance in such relatively respectable fare as Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. and Herzog's Nosferatu, she was given the career boost of a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Her, um, performance in Andrzej Zulawski's tortured art-horror film Possession was cited.

Make no mistake -- Adjani is actually pretty good in the movie, in that she offers more or less exactly what the material requires. There's a long, loud scene where Anna (Adjani) spends a good five minutes wigging out, giving her whole body over to a screaming, swooning fit in the subway tunnels under Berlin. Adjani performs admirably, throwing herself against the walls, spitting and convulsing. Wracked with sobs, she finally drops to her knees, oozing blood and fluids from between her legs. We see the sequence, which is by turns gruesome and stupefying, in flashback. We've already learned that Anna did apparently give birth to something, which she's nurturing and feeding (guess, just guess) in the shadowy bedroom of a rented apartment.

Australian actor Sam Neill, who got even better genre practice playing the antichrist in The Final Conflict, is barely more restrained as Anna's estranged husband, Mark. He spends much of this movie shouting and fuming over his wife's sudden coldness. It's bad enough that she's taken a second lover, but he deals with that by pounding on the guy's door, shooting off his mouth, and getting his ass kicked. Once he learns that Anna is not, in fact, living with her lover, he hires an investigator to follow her around town. When the private dick winds up getting fed to Anna's little monster, relations turn more violent and bizarre.

The creature itself is the wholly impressive creation of SFX guru Carlo Rambaldi, who found greener pastures just a year later, when he designed the eponymous E.T. This barely-seen nightmare is Possession's star attraction, especially when the critter takes Adjani on camera in the missionary position.

I know, I know. Sam Neill plays a baffled cuckold, Adjani freaks out and gets screwed on screen by her monster baby, so how bad could it be? Pretty bad, because Zulawski's heart is in the wrong place. Even if this sounds like your cup of tea, the director's sub-Bergman aspirations sink what could have been a quick and dirty horror story into a sub-Cronenberg psychological swamp. The whole movie seems to be an elaborate metaphor for a doomed, codependent relationship. Anna's monster child grows up to become an alternate version of her abusive husband; a schoolteacher who takes a shine to the couple's son becomes Mark's mistress and an idealized stand-in for his ever-more-distant wife. (Adjani plays both roles.) Problem is, the fever-pitch performances are so ridiculous that you don't really care what happens to either of these people. And worse, Possession takes itself way too seriously.

Still, if you're like me, you may consider something like this a must-see just for curiosity value. Trouble is, you're going to have to do some work to hunt down a copy. The version commonly available on video in the U.S. runs less than 90 minutes, and is reportedly incomprehensible. I watched a tape dubbed from a Japanese laserdisc that I clocked at about 124 minutes -- still three minutes shy of the original 127-minute running time, but really more than enough.