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.
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.