Possession

Zulawski wrote it during his own divorce and it is not subtle about that. A man returns to Berlin, his wife wants to leave him, and the film escalates from marital argument to something that cannot be summarised without sounding ridiculous.

Isabelle Adjani won at Cannes for it and has said it took her years to recover. The miscarriage sequence in the U-Bahn underpass is a single take of an actress screaming and convulsing against tiled walls for three minutes, and there is nothing else like it in cinema.

It is filed as a video nasty, which on any reading is absurd: it was an official Cannes selection and Adjani won best actress. It was on the DPP list because it has a tentacle creature in it and somebody was working from a list of titles.

Difficult, and not in the way most difficult films are difficult.