Possum: Matthew Holness and the Puppet in the Bag

Matthew Holness spent the early 2000s playing Garth Marenghi, a preposterous horror novelist of immense self-regard, in a Channel 4 series that remains the sharpest parody of the genre anyone has produced. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace worked because Holness understood horror from the inside — you cannot mock a form that precisely without loving it and having taken it apart on a table.

In 2018 he made Possum, his first feature, and told no jokes whatsoever. It is ninety minutes of a man walking across Norfolk with a bag, and it is one of the most genuinely upsetting British films of its decade. The parodist turned out to have been holding something back.

The loop

The plot, described flatly, sounds like nothing. Philip (Sean Harris) is a children’s puppeteer, disgraced in some way the film declines to specify at first, returning to the derelict family house he grew up in. His stepfather Maurice (Alun Armstrong) is still there — filthy, wheedling, delighted to see him in a way that is instantly and comprehensively wrong. Philip carries a brown holdall. In the holdall is Possum: a puppet with a human face and a spider’s body.

Philip spends the film trying to get rid of it. He takes it out to the fields and abandons it. He tries water. He tries fire. He tries burial. He walks to the empty army land and the dead railway and the flat brown Norfolk nothing, and he leaves the bag, and he goes back to the house, and the bag is there.

That is the structure. It repeats. Holness has built a feature film on a loop of failed disposal, and the repetition is the entire technique — because this is the shape of an intrusive memory, and Holness is filming the mechanism rather than the metaphor. A thing you cannot leave anywhere, that returns to your possession no matter what you do to it, that you have to keep carrying while you go about your business and that nobody else can see you carrying: anyone who has tried to outrun something in their own history will recognise the choreography immediately. The film never explains this. It just runs the loop until you feel it.

The source is instructive. Possum began as a short story Holness wrote for The New Uncanny, a 2008 Comma Press anthology that commissioned writers to respond directly to Freud’s essay on the uncanny — the one about the unheimlich, the unhomely, the familiar thing that has gone wrong. Most films that get called Freudian have had the label applied by critics afterwards. This one was commissioned to the brief.

The Quays’ puppet, and the Workshop

Two craft decisions carry the picture, and both are choices to use specialists from outside the film industry.

The puppet was built by the Brothers Quay, the American-born, Britain-based animators whose work has spent forty years in the specific territory of dolls that are wrong. Possum is their design, and what makes it unbearable is a precise calibration. The body is arachnid, long-limbed, obviously artificial, obviously a made object. The face is a human face — realistic, adult, expressionless, and unmistakably a face rather than a mask. Neither element is frightening. The join is. The Quays put a real human countenance on something that moves like an animal and gave it no expression at all, so it has the one quality a puppet must never have: it appears to be withholding.

Crucially it is a physical object on the set. Sean Harris is looking at a real thing, carrying real weight, and Holness shoots it in ordinary daylight with no shame about it. Modern horror would have kept it in shadow and given it a sting. Holness puts it in a field, in the middle of the frame, in flat grey Norfolk light, and lets you look at it for as long as you can stand.

The sound is the Radiophonic Workshop — the BBC’s electronic music unit, the people responsible for the noises that terrified British children for three decades from behind a sofa. Their score for Possum is the film’s second body: analogue, organic, wheezing, built from tones that sound like machinery with a respiratory system. It does something modern scores have forgotten how to do, which is to be unpleasant rather than tense. There is no build and no release. It simply persists at a level of low bodily wrongness, and it is the reason the walking sequences are frightening when nothing at all is happening in them.

Kit Fraser’s photography completes it. Norfolk here is a landscape with no features to rest on — brown, flat, drained of green, with a horizon that offers nowhere to go. Philip walks and walks and gets nowhere, and the geography agrees with the structure.

The real ancestor is the public information film

Possum gets shelved with the puppet films, and that lineage is legitimate — everything with a dummy in it descends from Dead of Night and Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist, and Holness knows it. Its actual parentage is British public-service broadcasting in the 1970s.

Consider The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the 1973 Central Office of Information film in which a hooded figure narrated by Donald Pleasence stalks children around ponds and gravel pits, waiting for them to drown. It ran on television, between programmes, aimed at eight-year-olds. Consider the whole apparatus around it: Children of the Stones, the Ghost Story for Christmas strand, the Radiophonic Workshop’s own idents, an entire national childhood conducted in the presence of state-commissioned dread. Britain spent a decade teaching its children that the ordinary landscape near their house contained something patient and personally interested in them.

Possum is made of that, deliberately and completely. The colour palette, the dead public land, the Workshop’s tones, the rhyming verse Philip recites about the thing in the bag — which is written in the exact register of a children’s rhyme and functions as one, which is why it is so hard to sit through. Holness has taken the aesthetic of British children’s television at its most malignant and used it to talk about what was actually being done to some of those children while they watched. That is the argument the film is making, and the aesthetic is the argument. Nothing in Possum is a stylistic homage.

The nearest modern relative is Kill List, which shares the flat British ugliness and the refusal to signal, though Wheatley’s film has a plot engine and Holness has declined one. For the airless, industrial, dream-adjacent quality, Eraserhead is the obvious grandparent, and Holness has clearly watched it. Set it against something like Ghost Stories — the same national tradition, played warm and affectionate — and you can see how far Holness pushed.

Sean Harris

He is in almost every frame and he speaks very little. Harris is one of the great British physical actors and Possum is his showcase: Philip’s whole condition is expressed through posture, a hunched, apologetic, ducking carriage, and a walk that seems designed to occupy as little of the world as possible. He handles the bag the way you would handle something that might be evidence.

The performance’s boldest quality is that it invites no sympathy. Harris plays Philip as genuinely off-putting, furtive in a way that makes the local suspicion about him entirely reasonable, and the film sits with that discomfort for an hour without offering the audience a reassurance. It is a much braver choice than it looks, because a film about a victim that makes the victim unpleasant is risking the only thing keeping viewers in their seats.

Armstrong is the other pole and he is magnificent. Maurice is all bonhomie and phlegm, a man who fills a room with cheerful nothing, and Armstrong plays him with the specific awfulness of someone who has never once been challenged in his own house.

The case against

It is repetitive on purpose and it is still repetitive. The loop is the technique, and there is a point around the sixty-minute mark where the technique has fully delivered its information and the film keeps running it, which some viewers will experience as accumulation and others will experience as a stall. Both readings are defensible; I have had both at different times.

The film also has almost no plot in the conventional sense, and the one strand it does run — a missing local boy, reported on the radio — is doing structural work rather than dramatic work. Anyone arriving for a story will leave unsatisfied, and the film is not much interested in helping them.

What it does, it does completely. Possum is a horror film with one image, one loop and one subject, executed by a comedian who understood the genre well enough to parody it and then refused to make it comfortable. Watch it in the afternoon. Do not watch it before bed.

Spoilers below

The subject is childhood sexual abuse, and Maurice is the man who did it. Holness withholds this in the sense that he never has anyone state it, and he does not withhold it at all in the sense that the film’s every texture is announcing it from the first scene — Maurice’s manner, the house, the bedroom Philip cannot enter, the disgrace that ended his career and which the film eventually locates in an incident with a puppet and children.

The Possum puppet is therefore doing double work, and the film is scrupulous about keeping both meanings live. It is the memory, which cannot be disposed of and returns to the bag. It is also the thing Philip is afraid he has become, because the abused child’s most durable horror is the suspicion of inheritance — that the thing done to you is now inside you, wearing your face, and that this is why nobody should let you near their children. That is why the puppet has a human head and a body that is all reach and no self. The Quays built the fear in.

The missing boy resolves in the house, because of course he does. The house is where everything in Philip’s life is kept, and the film’s cruellest structural joke is that Philip has spent ninety minutes walking to the ends of Norfolk trying to abandon a puppet while the actual crime sat in the building he keeps returning to, being committed by the man who has been feeding him tea.

Maurice does not survive the confrontation, and Holness stages the killing so the agency is deliberately blurred — Philip, or the thing out of the bag, and the film declines to separate them because the whole film has been arguing that they cannot be separated. There is no catharsis on offer. Philip does not recover, and he is not absolved. What he gets is the thin, specific relief of the loop finally breaking: a man who has established, at enormous cost, what the thing in his bag actually is and where it came from. Holness lets that be enough, and it barely is.