Demon

Poland/Israel, 2015, DCP, 2.35, colour, 94′, in Polish, English and Yiddish with Slovene and English subtitles
15.4. | 17:00 | Kinodvor

directed byMarcin Wrona written byMarcin Wrona, Paweł Maslona cinematography Paweł Flis editing Piotr Kmiecik music Krzysztof Penderecki, Marcin Macuk cast Itay Tiran, Agnieszka Żulewska, Tomasz Schuchardt, Tomasz Ziętek, Andrzej Grabowski, Włodzimierz Press, Adam Woronowicz festivals Toronto, Haifa, Sitges (Best Cinematography), FIFI Bordeaux (Special Jury Mention), Austin Fantastic Fest (Best Horror Film), Cottbus (Special Jury Mention), Stockholm, Fanomenon Leeds, Tallinn Black Nights

A young man is a stranger visiting the hometown of his future wife. As a wedding gift from the bride’s grandfather, he receives a piece of land where the two can build a house and raise a happy family. While preparing the land to build the house he finds the bones of human bodies in the ground beneath his new property. Strange things begin to happen to change this happy couple’s lives forever.

The third and tragically final film by the late director Marcin Wrona, a great young hope of Polish cinema, is a modern-day take on the Jewish folklore legend of dybbuk that strides the ever dangerous tightrope between art-house and genre cinema with boldness and confidence. In 2011 Marcin was a guest at Kino Otok – Isola Cinema Film Festival in Slovenia, where he presented his tough and nuanced second feature The Christening (Chrzest, 2009).

“What’s most important to me in this film is the tale of spirituality, which is now very difficult to access or it has completely changed its face. What we tried to achieve in this film was for the wedding guests to be confronted by something supernatural. They don’t know how to act on it or how to communicate with it. We have used grotesque horror in our film, but our aim wasn’t to copy Japanese or Spanish or American horror films, they have their own demons, we wanted to use ours. The title Demon was chosen very deliberately, too. In fact we meant the dybbuk not the demon. But since the latter is rather forgotten nowadays we decided to use a contemporary word that most of our wedding guests would use. Dybbuk was very present in Poland when the Jewish community here was still very numerous. Once they left the land so did the dybbuks. Demon is different than dybbuk. Dybbuk doesn’t have to be scary. It’s a returning soul which returns not to scare away but rather to remind us of respect for tradition. And that is what we were trying to achieve with our film. I didn’t want in any way for the film to be about the Holocaust. I wanted to touch the mystic aspect of the Jewish-Polish lives and hence the idea to cast an Israeli actor in our film.”
– Marcin Wrona

“On paper, Marcin Wrona’s Demon should be a cliché-ridden tale of a demonic possession and the effect it has on a young couple’s relationship. After all, that’s the template for a handful of genre films that are released every single year. But Wrona’s latest is not your typical possession story – it’s something entirely different. … Despite its inherently dark and supernatural elements, make no mistake about it; Demon is not a horror movie. To be perfectly honest, it’s a stretch to even label it as a psychological thriller. It’s a movie that is almost impossible to put it into a specific box because of its seemingly endless layers. For much of the film, Demon plays out like a traditional drama and then swiftly transitions into a pseudo-comedic tale of a seemingly cursed wedding. Even the dybbuk – the film’s sole villain – isn’t imposing and has the appearance of a lovely, albeit dead, young woman. Still, there are some legitimate horror aspects throughout, including a very on-the-nose homage to The Shining. But Demon is as much in line with My Big Fat Greek Wedding as it is with Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece.”
– Blair Hoyle, Way Too Indie

“Here’s another excellent aspect of fest-going—it’s sometimes the film with the least recognizable faces that makes the greatest impact. Such is the case in this dispatch, as the best movie of this motley crew is Marcin Wrona’s Demon, a unique take on the Jewish legend of the Dybbuk that feels both deeply rooted in cultural nightmares and refreshingly new. It’s a possession tale with a spin, a take on the idea that marriage changes us, making us someone new, someone unfamiliar, and the fear that comes with that act of giving up one’s older self. … Demon is stylish and clever from its concept—how many men about to marry have said something along the lines of ‘the old me is dead’—but it’s the execution that really matters. There’s a great energy to the piece, from the framing of the visual compositions, to the eerie atmosphere created by the lights hanging from the ceiling of what looks like a barn. There’s fantastic costume design as well as a lead performance that engages on every level.”
– Brian Tallerico, www.rogerebert.com

“A chilling, romantic, surprisingly humorous take on demonic possession.”
– Howard Gorman, Shock Till You Drop