Demon is one of the best horror films ever made. It is set in Poland. A Polish British man, Piotr, enthusiastically moves to Poland to marry and live with his bride, Zaneta, and celebrate with his friend now brother in law, Jasny, on his grandfather in law’s unkept estate. As he works on renovating the grounds the day before the wedding, he discovers something disturbing, but does not want to ruin the proceedings. Once uncovered, the truth cannot be buried.
I remember seeing the preview for Demon in theaters, and whomever I was with agreed that we had to see it in theaters. Unfortunately it either never came to a theater near us, or it did, and I was not as dogged in monitoring new releases. Foreign films rarely have long run times, and a film with subtitles that defies tidily fitting into a genre would not have been appealing. It took years for this film to become available for home viewing. I saw it over a year ago on DVD, but it is now streaming on Amazon Prime. If I was forced to complain about the film, I would point to the subtitles being white, which was hard to read when some scenes have light backgrounds. Even if you hate subtitles, I would still encourage you to try and watch this film.
If I had to classify Demon, I would call it historical horror. Without being pedantic, all you need is a little historical knowledge of Poland during the twentieth century to scream at Piotr to tell that boat to turn around and run. I am unfamiliar with the legend that inspires the supernatural elements of the story, but the dybbuk is the least scary part of this film. There are Gothic and body horror elements, and the latter half is predominantly psychological horror. While there is zero gore, it is evocative of the horror that chills me when I see a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have yes, and an entire community is warped. I am really glad that I saw Midsommar before this film so in spite of the sunny arrival, I was attuned to the early portents: screams, people desperate to leave, but unable to, display of strange behavior, constantly looking at the edges of the frame for clues.
Demon is unsettling because Piotr is a stranger, and these people are too. We do not know how they normally behave, but the act of choosing to stay in a certain place damns them. Ignorance is no defense. Ignorance is the offensive play that each character, even the victims of this story, choose. “We must forget what we didn’t see here.” Each person privileges happiness and appearance over the devastating reality except for the one person who successfully escapes the grip of the land.
Like Dani in Midsommar, Piotr engages in reverse immigration. We never learn anything about why his family left Poland or if he still has any family in Poland or London, which is where he is from. He is obviously in love with Zaneta, but he is also in love with the area-eager to repair the past and make it new again; however his mistake is seeing the past through rose-colored glasses and trusting that he is joining a community of decent people. His love for Zaneta seems to be wrapped up in her roots to the land and family history, which he lacks as a first generation British person. Unlike Midsommar, this community’s history and traditions are not a point of pride. Everyone is complicit and monstrous, but mainly because they try to erase reality, history, in a disastrous attempt to avoid consequences. The institutions and the people are trapped in a cycle of shame, dysfunction, guilt, denial and despair.
Demon depicts the systematic failure of institutions throughout the wedding night: family, church, science, education. If a person’s life was not on the line, it would be a comedy of errors or a farce. The priest and the doctor treat the turn of events like a hot potato. The priest is sober and smart enough to decide to try and get the hell out of there as soon as possible by any means necessary. The doctor is the last person that you should trust with anyone’s health. Education is personified through a Jewish professor who solves the mystery, but acknowledges the limits of his power. No one listens to him. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes, or as the professor says, “There is no society without memory.” Even marriage vows are disrespected as people constantly try to separate the wife from her husband to keep up appearances.
Once the strange events are spelled out, it made me retroactively question how frequently such things happen. The land cries out. From the first time that Ronaldo is introduced, before we even know his name or his job, he is acting strange. Almost every character acts hysterical as if they are hiding something and know more than they are saying. Demon is such a haunting movie because it creates this thick atmosphere of grotesque, but easily rationalized human behavior. Either way, they are uniformly horrible people as if they are wearing Red Shoes that compel them. The sins of the grandfathers are visited on the children and grandchildren. Their only way to escape, a person willing to build a bridge between the old world and the new, is treated negligently. It is easy to see how past atrocities could be committed considering how they treat each other and their own. Evil does not die.
Demon has a great story and is gorgeous. The isolation of the land is perfectly captured at the construction work site, the desolate, empty streets, the foreboding juxtaposition of funerals with centers of joy. The supernatural moments are close to indiscernible from the realistic moments. There is enough ambiguity that it made me wonder if things did vanish, were hidden or actually consumed the day before the wedding. Which guests are people and which are actually ghosts? There is one great scene when the doctor drops a vial, and a small hand returns it to him. Were there ever kids at the wedding? People are so adept at invading spaces that it is hard to separate real compulsive consuming behavior and the preternatural grasping. It is only the last scene on the property that is not unique to this movie—it is a homage to The Shining.
Itay Tiran, who plays the groom, is a thespian, and if he was not a foreign actor, he would get all the work. The physicality of his performance is the equivalent of CGI in other movies. He nails depicting Piotr, and even though we do not know Piotr, he emotionally conveys when Piotr is struggling and transforms over the course of the wedding night until he embodies a range unheard of in its subtlety to represent a fierce, stubborn vulnerability and gender range that other actors would fail at accomplishing.
Marcin Wrona wrote and directed Demon, but if you are interested in seeing his other movies, it may be difficult because he mainly worked on television series and had two prior feature films, which do not appear to be available in the US. Demon was his last movie, and he committed suicide while promoting the film by hanging himself in a hotel room, which I did not know when I initially watched the film. Wrona’s final film feels as if it is a cri de coeur out of frustration for being surrounded by people stubbornly living in the present and blaming everything but their own greed for comfort, prosperity and the image of perfection for the ills of the spirit that cannot be redeemed without a willingness to grapple with the ugliness of the past and how it makes people culpable in the present.
