Demon (2015 film)

Demon is a 2015 Polish horror film written and directed by Marcin Wrona. It was shown in the Vanguard section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.^[1] It was Wrona's last feature film, as he committed suicide on 19 September 2015 while promoting the film at a Gdynia film festival.^[2]

Plot

Piotr (Itay Tiran), who has been living and working in England for many years, and Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska), a Polish lady, are to be married; they had met only over the internet, but he knew her brother. Piotr speaks Polish awkwardly, remembering more from his ancestors than from personal experience. He moves into a run-down large rural estate previously owned by Zaneta's grandfather. While digging in the yard with a backhoe right before the wedding, he finds a skeleton, which at first he keeps quiet about. He is increasingly haunted by the vision of a woman in a wedding dress - Hana. During the wedding reception this vision draws closer and closer to him, he has apparent seizures, and is eventually possessed by Hana, the woman in the dress. Zaneta's family is well-to-do, and they want to keep his breakdown quiet from the rest of the wedding guests, so they distract their guests with vodka and loud music while locking Piotr in the basement, first with a doctor, then a priest. Finally, the "teacher" (Wlodzimierz Press, who appears to be the only surviving Jewish resident of the town pre-war), realizes Piotr is speaking Yiddish, and that he is possessed by the spirit of Hana, a lovely Jewish girl he knew before the war who suddenly disappeared. The film is a re-telling of a classic dybbuk story and also an allegory for Polish-Jewish relations before and after the war. It is implied that Zaneta's grandfather may have gotten rich in part by "possessing" this property once its former Jewish residents were gone.

Cast

• Itay Tiran
• Agnieszka Zulewska
• Tomasz Schuchardt
• Andrzej Grabowski
• Adam Woronowicz
• Wlodzimierz Press
• Tomasz Zietek
• Katarzyna Gniewkowska
• Agnieszka Zulewska

Reception

Giuseppe Sedia of the Krakow Post noted that the character played by Israeli actor Itay Tiran turns out to be "the most tormented groom ever seen in Polish film". He added that "the distastrous reception is drenched in vodka just like the banquet displayed in Wojciech Smarzowski's The Wedding but purged from any black comedy".^[3] The film suffered from vote brigading on IMDB.^[4]

References

External links

• Demon on IMDb