Some films excel at that kind of grimy, disconcerting quality which Possum (2018) has in abundance. Every frame of this film makes your skin crawl: it’s a love letter to abandoned places and anonymous spaces, swept through with dead foliage and rot. This, in and of itself, makes the film fairly challenging viewing, even whilst you can appreciate the skill which went into arranging its sets and locations throughout. Add to this an arachnid puppet which seems to stand in for a grown man’s arrested development and mental trauma, and you have a fairly gruelling viewing experience. However, Possum doesn’t lend itself particularly readily to a coherent narrative – with the result that those not hypnotised by its interesting looks might find the whole experience as frustrating as it is unsettling.
The ‘blurb’ for the film tells us that Philip, the film’s chief protagonist (played with rare skill by Sean Harries) is returning to his dilapidated childhood home after some nameless disgrace has ended his career as a children’s entertainer, but – whether by nature of brutal editing, or out of a general sense of dispensing with straightforward plot development – no details whatsoever about this debacle are forthcoming, so that you would only really know this by reading about it. For all intents and purposes, we only see a middle-aged man carrying a holdall, on a journey of some kind. This is an obviously tortured guy, with not an albatross round his neck, but a terrifying tree-limbed spider marionette with a human face. I suppose if Philip was using this puppet to ‘entertain’ children, then it’s no wonder his career has come to an abrupt end, but there’s doubtless more to it than that.
Philip seems very invested in the puppet, which he calls ‘Possum’ (why?) but he also wants to get rid of it; its hold over him has obviously been of some duration, given that once back inside the squalid home where stepfather Maurice (Alun Armstrong) still lives, he is drawn towards picture books he seems to have had since childhood, which describe Possum in as terrifying a way as a certain similar book described a certain Babadook-dook-dook. Worse still, every time Philip tries to dispose of Possum, he ends up with it back in his life by mysterious means. Meanwhile, we are shown that he takes peculiar, unseemly interests in the goings-on around him, showing an odd fascination with a teenage boy he sees drawing on the train, perhaps seeing his scrawls as marking him out as a kindred spirit. We are also party to a very stilted resumption of Philip’s relationship with his stepfather, a man who seems perfectly at ease with the squalor which surrounds him, and who has little to say to his relative-by-marriage, other than laughing variously at his clear discomfort.
As the film progresses, Philip looks authentically more and more haunted by Possum, and seemingly more and more in need of getting things off his chest. It is certainly impressive to see how Harries manages to enact this increasing sense of oppression, as he almost disappears inside himself during the film’s progress. He also looks authentically ill, which is testament at least to the turmoil he’s feeling, even if he describes it very little indeed. In some respects Possum reminds me of the underappreciated Tony (2009), another film with a troubled, but unseemly male main character. As for Philip, his desperation to burn or to ditch the horrible puppet thing is, we see, useless; the more he seems to try to deal with this nightmarish situation, the more Possum appears, spider-limbed and vicious, in his dreams. Some of the sequences in Possum are genuinely unsettling, capturing something of those helpless childhood fears which so many of us seek in the horror cinema we watch as adults. Director/writer Matthew Holness clearly appreciates a good, creeping scare, and can bring a certain sense of a child’s powerlessness to the screen.
However, whilst you can feel genuine sympathy with such a tortured soul, there is very little in the way of closure here, just as there’s little concrete to get hold of throughout. My understanding of Philip’s issues with Maurice are essentially inferred, and not a little based on a kind of prejudice: I can’t, honestly, think of an interpretation for his trauma except for a certain kind of trauma, albeit one which is not exactly spelled out either. In fact, by the film’s close, I wasn’t sure whether I believed that most of the characters I’d watched were really present, so surreal and abstruse is the film as a whole. Overall, I feel that whatever else the film chooses to do or not to do, it badly needs a punchline. Not a neat tying-together of all loose ends, but something to avoid that final sense that little has taken place.
If you enjoy these kinds of exercises in atmospherics, then there is a great deal to love about Possum. Indeed, if you prefer cinema which is not forthcoming and leaves you with a series of sensations rather than telling a linear story, then it’s a triumph. However, this kind of approach is a risk, one which seemed to split the audience at Celluloid Screams, and one which I’d imagine will have a similar impact wherever Possum is seen and debated.
Possum screened at Celluloid Screams Film Festival 2018 and will be released in the UK on the 26th October 2018.