Demon (2015)
Palpable terror and dark comedy possess this powerful allegory from a talented artist who tragically left us too soon
Directed by: Marcin Wrona
Cinematography by: Pawel Flis
The people of Poland have had a muddled relationship with the holocaust since WWII. While they suffered devastating losses and were substantial victims of Nazism - with no shortage of underground resistance fighters who may have had to play along on the surface in order to counter from the shadows during the occupation – like many other countries, they were not without genuine Nazi sympathizers and willing collaborators. And like many other countries, they have tried to bury that involvement - to the point of threatening to imprison anyone who accuses the Polish State of Nazi cooperation. This erasure of history and violation of memory, a societal failure to recognize or atone for the antisemitic sins of their own countrymen, is where Marcin Wrona’s 2015 supernatural folk horror Demon enters. A film marked by a sense of doom and disillusionment with the world that bled deeply into reality, adding even more tragedy to its haunting atmosphere when the director took his own life while debuting the project on the festival circuit.
Wrona’s suicide would be felt by many, whether family, friends or the film community at large. The themes of Demon display a filmmaker indebted to truth and empathy, with a technique that’s not flashy yet is imbued with a distinct style full of both the intuition and thoughtfulness that marks an artist really coming into their own. In his final film, Wrona brilliantly employs the conventions of the wedding comedy (offering up plenty of dry, tongue-in-cheek humor throughout the horror-soaked proceedings) to tell a layered allegory of historical erasure and the sins of our ancestors. Much of Demon can be summed up by a question one of the characters asks: “What happens when a white snowflake falls into a dirty puddle?”
Setting the tone early, Wrona opens Demon with a construction digger roaming down the streets of a silent, lifeless village. It immediately conjures an unsettling mood for the film, and before any characters have even been introduced, Wrona visually connects the ideas of an excavator and a ghost town, cluing us in that the spirits of the dead will soon be unearthed. Following this, we get our first glimpse of the main character, Piotr (the digger’s owner), as he travels by boat down a river, where he encounters another foreboding omen. As the camera dizzily pans and zooms, the boat passes by what appears to be a search party, and at its focus, a shrieking restrained woman, waist deep in the water.
The implication is that of a drowning – disturbing enough as it is – but when the grieving woman makes direct eye contact with a shaken Piotr, the feeling is that of a Hadean shade in the River Styx delivering a warning cry for the soon-to-be groom to turn back now or fall victim to the fates. Piotr does not turn back though, and from here, we cut to the film’s title, erratically scratched over an image of a massive construction pit, red-rimmed and gaping like the mouth of hell. It’s this yawning pit where Piotr rendezvouses with his new brutish father-in-law, and as the main plot of the film kicks off, we’re already immersed in a rising pool of inescapable dread.
After meeting up with his fiancée Zanetta at the rundown yet spacious rural estate the two inherited from Zanetta’s grandfather – which will also serve as the couple’s reception site – Piotr sets to work using the digger to clear debris from the grounds for the post-ceremony revelry that will be taking place the following day. While maneuvering his prized machine, Piotr accidentally uproots a tree and, for his second big shock of the day, discovers human remains under the spot the tree was planted. An unmarked grave that he will be told merely contains the bones of a pet dog. That night, on the eve of his wedding, still disturbed by what he found, Piotr goes to investigate again. As rain pounds down around him, the bridegroom’s flashlight catches the silhouette of a woman in white – and the soil turns swamp to swallow him whole into the earth.
A slightly confused but ostensibly unharmed Piotr – aside from the strange dirt stains on his fingers and face – is awoken by Zanetta’s brother the following morning. The early events of the day go off without a hitch, and the wedding is full of joy and laughter, even through the wind and rain that has returned from the previous night. But as discordant strings creep over the soundtrack, we realize that all is not as well as it seems. The revelry is spoiled by a bitter taste. The off-screen shouts of joy sound sinister, closer to screams that send chills up one’s spine. “What happens when a white snowflake falls into a dirty puddle?” It's tainted. It’s changed. And its form melts, becoming that of the substance.
We witness the first changes in Piotr’s behavior at the reception when after the couple’s first shot of vodka (I know), the non-Semitic Piotr inexplicably stomps on his glass in the Jewish custom instead of throwing it over his shoulder in line with the Polish Catholic tradition, leaving a surprised Zanetta to correct him. Things escalate quickly throughout the night as nosebleeds, hallucinations, fainting spells, and eventually seizures beset the fraying newlywed. Zanetta’s father, quick to keep up appearances, explains it away to the guests as undiagnosed epilepsy and too much alcohol, as he ironically encourages the partiers to drink more and suggests that perhaps Piotr simply needs another drink as well to calm his nerves. However, when Piotr loses complete control and begins speaking in tongues, more drastic actions are taken, and without her knowledge, Zanetta’s family binds Piotr in the cellar. Whether possessed or sick, the groom’s flaws can’t be allowed to stain their family’s reputation.
At a loss for what to do next, Zanetta’s family consults a wedding guest, an old professor – who just so happens to be the only surviving Jewish resident of the town. He quickly reveals that Piotr is not speaking in tongues but speaking in Yiddish, and upon further questioning, Piotr (or whatever has a hold of Piotr) claims to be a girl named Hana, a young Jewish girl who the professor fondly remembers from his childhood. A young girl who, along with her family, disappeared without a trace during the war. A young girl whose family owned that plot of land that became Zanetta’s grandfather’s after the war. A young girl whose bones were buried unceremoniously in the dirt, with a tree planted on top to conceal the hidden grave. A young girl whose spirit didn’t return: it never left. Left to rot and fester in the earth like a dormant disease that would eventually surface under the right conditions. As she tells the professor, “They think I’m dead, but I am not.”
The professor informs Zanetta, her family, and the other confidants within the room that he believes Piotr is possessed by a dybbuk, a Jewish spirit with unfinished business. He explains, “In Jewish tradition the soul of a dead person can cling to a living one, in order to carry out what death interrupted… It’s the chance for it to purge itself, but also to purge to the soul of the possessed one.” And we’re led to believe that Zanetta’s grandfather and likely some other Nazi-collaborating townsfolk murdered Hana and either killed or informed on the rest of her family as well (perhaps with the intent of claiming the property as their own or perhaps that was just an added reward).
Shortly after this, Piotr himself “disappears,” and while a search party is sent to find him, Zanetta’s father gathers the punch-drunk and slumped wedding guests in the reception hall and, in slurred double-speak, announces, “We must forget what he didn’t see here,” calling the night’s events a “collective hallucination.” He continues on to inform everyone that, in fact, there never was a wedding; there never was a groom. And in another act of inspired symbolism, Wrona cuts to a close-up of a woman’s hands during part of the speech as she pieces together a shattered wedding glass shard by shard: an unstable façade, a constructed memory destined to fall apart again.
Demon ends with a familial accomplice rolling Piotr’s car into the giant ravine at the center of the Hellmouth construction pit from the film’s early scenes and the digger tearing down the home where the newlywed couple were going to build their life. In a repetition of history, the powerful again attempt to repress the past and conceal it deep within the dirt, but as we’ve learned, memories can’t stay buried forever, and the ghosts of the past always return. While Wrona’s allegory is a condemnation of his own country’s cracked historical memory, it’s hard not to connect parallels to my own country, and the metaphors are certainly apt for America’s continued erasure and attempted revisionisms of slavery, oppression, and indigenous genocide. The only real demons are the ones we’ve created and those we as individuals and societies try to bury; ignore; forget. The ones we must acknowledge and atone for. Because ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s a ticking time bomb. Our feigned innocence will fall back into the dirty puddles of our histories. Our demons are bound to return. Without justice, there is only punishment.
However, the final, somewhat cryptic images of Wrona’s remarkably realized folk horror are less demoralizing. The images are that of Zanetta (who only showed love for both her suffering husband and the poor soul that possessed him), wearing Piotr’s jacket, staring into the camera as she leaves on the same boat that he arrived on. It’s largely ambiguous, but I believe Wrona was communicating that Zanetta herself has become possessed by Piotr and, in turn, Hana, yet in a way that’s far less malicious and much more symbiotic. Rather than a victim, Zanetta is a vessel for the spirits of the dead, a way to remember them, to spread their stories, and to help right the wrongs exacted against them. And with this recognition between Zanetta and the camera (i.e., the audience), Wrona leaves us with the feeling that we too can become these vessels; that in order to heal, we can, and we must fight for those dispossessed spirits instead of against them.
RIP Marcin Wrona. Your spirit lives on as well.
Distributed by: The Orchard
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