possessed by a puerto rican killer?
is that kinda what happens?
shareYes, that's it. He's possessed by the spirit of a Puerto Rican man who died. That sends his sister on a path to exploring a different culture in search of a remedy.
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MovieChat Forums > The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972) Discussion > possessed by a puerto rican killer?
yep thats itWhen there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
it's both a culture clash film and a comment on Classism. He and his sister were apparently very privileged Upper East Siders despite being Irish which is a minor disconnect. (I'm an Irish NYCER so I can say that I suppose). He's one of those free spirits who travels the world looking for truth and the meaning of life. She's a slightly embittered divorcee who is supported in style by her wealthy surgeon ex-hubby.
Things go haywire when Joel gets back from a trip to tangiers and shacks up in the east Village with a Puerto Rican friend he just met. We don't know what happened to this guy just that he's gone and Joel now lives in his apartment. The first incident where he gets carted off to Bellevue is his sister's first plunge into the "downtown" world and while there, she see a Santeria Altar in the super's apartment as well as some similar imagery in her brother's apartment.
There is a creepy vibe to the brother/sister relationship from the very beginning with an undercurrent of incest and sexual tension. As the film progresses, it gets more conventional as a possession story. It's slow at first but worth the investment of time at the beginning. Pay attention. DOn't be tempted to sit and do needlework or something, the stuff at the beginning is important!
I felt he was haywire since childhood because of the incest, and the fusion of his rigid upbringing and his Tangiers experiences and the Spanish Harlem poverty and his encounters with pseudomysticism and his sexual psychosis drove him over the edge.
I think the film (and book, but I haven't read it yet) was an in-the-moment psychological portrait of what life was like in New York in the 1970's, how in the 1970's Americans in general were a bit neurotic and adrift and self-absorbed and haywire, how poverty and drug use and crime and sexual liberality and new age mysticism/spirituality simultaneously hovered on the fringes of thought yet pervaded everything everywhere at all times, enough to drive someone sexually insane and mad (insane-mad). And how everyone was living in a dream-like daze as a result of the cultural changes of the 1960's and the Vietnam War.
Now this is one of the few instance in which I'd love to see a film remade, and Roman Polanski would be the perfect director. Many of his trademarks are in this film. Knives, sexual psychosis, minimal dialogue, intense paranoia, religious cultisms, the victim-becomes-victimizer theme, claustrophobia, menacing building, the lead character out of his element, Spanish Harlem a maze, intolerance.
What incest?
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