Popular reviews

• 

  Review by pd187 ★★½ 13

  i know writers who use subtext and theyre all cowards

• 

  Review by WraithApe ★★★ 31

  Darkly oblique, low key character study of a damaged mind. Philip is a puppeteer by profession, who is forced to return to his childhood home following his disgrace at his last paying gig. He terrified the kids with his puppet, a macabre arachnid creation with a blank head resembling his own. This is Possum, an alter ego which has haunted him since entering his life in childhood, preventing him from becoming a functioning adult.

  Scored by a brooding collection of dissonant field recordings and dark ambiance from The Radiophonic Workshop and envisioned through a muted palette of greys and earth tones, deep shadow saturating every frame, Possum is about as bleak as it gets. It riffs on The Babadook -…

• 

  Review by Chris ★★★★

  Bro that wasn't a possum

• 

  Review by kemely ★★★★★ 6

  I'm feeling completely dirty. my god. the final 5 minutes of this movie were too painful. i'm devastated. Sean Haris, my man, you deserve all the awards. i really felt in shock when the credits rolled. there are so many disturbing image here. metaphors and allegories that at first appear to be just that, a tool for the narration, but no, they aren't. i fooled myself thinking i'd just be that. really dark and powerful in every way possible. i never thought that a movie about a pet giant-ish spider would impact me so much. and hey, if you're thinking that this puppet monster thing only appears in a few scenes, well, i've got some good news for you .…

• 

  Review by Lizzy ★★★★ 9

  have any of you ever gotten that feeling you get when you’re watching creepy videos from the dark side of youtube? those sinister, experimental little videos you feel like you shouldn’t be watching, but you keep watching them because they’re sort of oddly fascinating and almost hypnotic? despite how unnerving and uneasy they are, you still feel weirdly drawn to them? this movie feels exactly like that.

• 

  Review by nick ★★ 3

  Possum is what happens when you stretch an okay idea into a full length feature with monotone delivery.

  Clearly drawing parallels between traumas and gruesome imaginary creatures, Possum starts with some truly breathtaking stills that give the audience a false impression that the whole experience is going to be as gripping, only for them to be tricked into enduring an oversized (despite its short runtime of 85 minutes) and flatfooted borefest reliant heavily on startling sound effects and jump scares to make its point. Shots are deliberately extended while the characters are conditioned to repeat the same routines over and over, building towards a final revelation that is objectively anti-climatic and incoherent, but still feels somewhat like a blessing in disguise.

  Possum is clearly an ambitious work as evidenced by its bleak, symbolic style, but the story just isn't inspired enough to take it anywhere further. Don't recommend.

• 

  Review by Evan T ★★★½

  If The Babadook, Eraserhead and Under the Skin raised a mutated baby, this is probably what it would look like. Matthew Holness’ decision to shoot on 35mm is a wise one, flickering film fibres, scratches and marks adding to the eerie cesspool of morbid allegory. Unfortunately, I guessed the conclusion (mistakenly treated as a twist) almost fifteen minutes in. To be frank, Sean Harris picks this film up and carries it all the way to its highly predictable end, but that’s not to say what’s underneath the surface imagery isn’t terrifying. On the contrary to its promotional art, Possum proves more than most horrors — there are much scarier things in the world than spiders.

• 

  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 9

  I've finally seen one of the films that I've been meaning to watch since I joined this site. A film with such a cryptic poster that I had no idea what to anticipate. Was it fully experimental? Was it animated or live action? I was fully entranced from the minute I saw it.

  And speaking of a film that aims to alienate nearly its entire audience. The picture has few spoken lines and several long stretches where seemingly nothing is happening, making it feel like a Lynchian nightmare. The script, awkward acting, filthy and dreary cinematography, haunting ambient score, and directing all contribute to progressively plunge you as an audience member into this state of absolute misery, into the psyche…

• 

  Review by ~findlay ★★★★★ 6

  "black as sin, it is"

  grease stains, oil stains, damp stains, fire stains
  /////going in?//////
  leaf rot, wood rot, brick rot, blood rot

  all houses you walked past, decaying under cold autumn skies, breathe with the quiet scent of doomed history. halls, shafts of light, leafs stuck to doors kicked in, grot-boiled wallpaper paste and a menace ready to repurposed.
  trauma poisoning is different for each individual but its a deadly elixir you take alone.

  hard industrial, food poisoning nightmare textures. blacked, oranged, gangrened. spiritually infected, stunted to grow. dead at the root. That soundtrack of field recordings (and a chunk of the locations) are clearly, andi hate saying this, Lynchian. Direct from Eraserhead is this cold desolate escape to…

• 

  Review by LetterBodnard ½ 1

  This script must have been five pages long.   You want to see a sweaty guy walk around and look at doors while the soundtrack tries to convince you something scary is going on?  Watch this then I guess?

• 

  Review by Madeleine ★★★★ 1

  A grim, distressing film. More a manifestation of the experience of living with trauma than a regular story, but there is a lot happening and building to clue you in to what and why you are watching, and it really pays off. 

  Philip is stuck in a childlike state well into adulthood, his posture, his inability to control his emotions. The grimy house like the inside of his skull. Sean Harris’s performance is so good and committed. I love the look, and am so happy to see a new horror flick shot on 35mm with intent and attention paid to the grain. And the Possum puppet is fantastic, creepy and only partially formed, weighted in such a way that I feel deeply uncomfortable every time it was on screen. I want one. 

  I walked out of this upset and shaken, but it’s been on my mind since. 

  Some things are hard to get rid of.

• 

  Review by claira curtis ★★

  Going in, and throughout the first act, Possum had a lot of promise. Its imagery is genuinely unnerving at times, grisly in a way that makes it feel like you shouldn’t be watching it. 

  However, as you go further into the story, things sputter out to such a sharp degree that once the crescendo of the story is reached, it feels too far gone to truly affect you. 

  I think, sadly, this film got so caught up in creating engaging subtext that it let the rest of things fall to the wayside. There’s a great performance from Sean Harris, a solid score, moments of exceptional camerawork, and the scariest puppet I’ve ever seen here, but none of that is enough to save Possum. 

  I think this would have thrived as a 30-40 minute long short.

  23/31 of my October 2020 Halloween Watches :)