POSSESSION

Year: 2002
USA: Focus Features
UK: Warner Bros
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Trevor Eve, Toby Stephens, Anna Massey, Tom Hollander, Holly Aird, Felicity Brangan, Shelley Conn, Graham Crowden, Henry Ian Cusick, Holly Earl. Elodie Frenck, Lena Headey, Tom Hickey, Alexi Kaye Campbell, Georgia Mackenzie, Kate O'Toole, Barbara Pierson, Jonty Stephens, Natalie Stevenson
Director: Neil LaBute
Country: USA
USA & UK: 93 mins
USA Rated: PG-13 for sexuality and some thematic elements
UK Certificate: 12A contains one brief moderate sex scene
USA Release Date: 16 August 2002 (Limited Release)
UK Release Date: 25 October 2002


Synopsis

What does it mean to risk, to truly risk all? To go after something that you and those around you would normally consider foolish, dangerous or just plain wrong - yet you cannot help yourself. Right or wrong, you are swept away...

Possession stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Maud Bailey, a brilliant English academic given to doing things by the book, who is researching the life and work of the poet, Christabel LaMotte (Ehle). Roland Michell (Eckhart) is an upstart American scholar in London on a fellowship to study the great Randolph Henry Ash (Northam), now best known for a collection of rapturous, late-life poems dedicated to his wife. When Maud and Roland discover a cache of love-letters that appear to be from Ash to LaMotte, they follow a trail of clues across England to the Continent, echoing the journey of the impassioned couple a century earlier.

Adapted from A S Byatt's 1999 novel 'Possession', which earned the author the UK's prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction. POSSESSION is the new film from Neil LaBute.