With a title like Possessed and a plot line concerning a woman's obsessive unrequited love for an aloof man, it is understandable if one does not expect much. But Possessed is actually a riveting psychological drama about the delicate nature of emotions and how they are often abused or taken for granted. Surely, not everyone would go to the extent Crawford goes in this film, but, as a woman working as a nurse to an invalid, she nor anyone who knows her would ever have expected her to. Emotional security can safely be said to provide one's equilibrium. Possessed is about someone who is deprived completely of it, at first by the man with whom she is in love, who loathes her smothering obsession with him and ends the relationship and goes so far as to leave the area, and furthermore by her own self for no reason other than that she is simply following her heart.<br /><br />When the invalid dies suddenly, Crawford remains to care for the invalid's children. Time carries on, stopping for no one, and her object of affection re-emerges, having taken a job with the deceased's husband. He is startled to find Crawford on the scene. Even now fixated on him, she makes an advance and is swiftly rejected. When the widowed husband of her dead patient proposes to her, she says yes to salvage her pride. Note that this happens literally just moments later. Her new fiancé's daughter is keen on to her true love, much to the debilitating alarm of Crawford, who endeavors to deter her from beginning a relationship with him. Her mind spirals sadly into deterioration with her mania over her unrequited love: She hears voices, hallucinates, and believes her husband's first wife, the invalid, to still be alive. As tensions mount, Crawford begins to believe that everyone is scheming to be rid of her.<br /><br />While Van Heflin gives an applaudably callous performance as the insensitive focus of obsession, partially because I cannot understand why such an incredibly ugly man like him so often plays roles of confidently unavailable loners after whom beautiful women obsess, Joan Crawford gives one of those tremendous performances that is almost like a throwback to ancient Greek theater when the protagonist was such an abundant function of the story to the extent that he had to portray every other character and even sometimes the props as well. She does in fact possess this movie with her brimming, affecting intensity and staggering beauty.<br /><br />However, this is not one of those star vehicles that couldn't work without its star. Director Curtis Bernhardt makes harrowing set pieces out of Crawford's paranoia and psychological descent. A hallucinatory scene wherein we join in her wildly vindictive feelings seems at the outset so entirely real that it is not only Crawford's performance that connects with us. The script itself is very effective in its undeviating sense of classic structure, which portrays the nuance, expression and feeling of its main character as directly as one ever could.