Hi everyone, Bryan Here….
Every couple has their own expectations and fantasies for their wedding day. It’s usually filled with flowers, rings, songs, and tons of drinks, hugs, and kisses. Every goes home, snuggles with their loved one, and almost always lives happily ever after. Most people say that your wedding day is one of the best days, if not the best day of your life, but that’s not the case with Marcin Wrona’s ‘Demon‘, which is more or less an odd tale about the Jewish myth of the dybbuk.
First off, this film is beautifully shot. Wrona’s eye for such a haunting atmosphere such as this setting is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Even though the film takes place over the course of someone’s wedding day, the mood and setting is extremely uneasy, as you’d expect something very sinister to pop out at any moment. There is a very Kubrick-ian feel to the movie as well, letting shots linger to build suspense and tension. The follows Piotr and his soon-to-be bride as they cross a river to a family plot of land to exchange their vows and dance the night away at their reception.
Soon enough, Piotr hears some strange noises, inspects these sounds outside and falls into a pit of mud. Next thing you know, he’s cleaned off and about to marry his beautiful bride, but he starts showing some very strange behavior in the form of having seizures, speaking different languages, and seeing things in the distance. The wedding party, mostly his brother-in-law and father-in-law begin to think the worst and try to calm the guests from having a meltdown, which was strange, because most all the guests at the party are either drinking heavily, having sex, or dancing with a mixture of all three at certain points.
It was a bit of comic relief for sure, but the one person who might know what’s happening with poor Piotr is a Jewish professor, who does indeed believe Piotr is possessed by something on his wedding day. Things eventually play out fairly slowly in a very ‘Shining-esque’ way, which is also similar to Kubrick here, which was nice to see. I wouldn’t say ‘Demon‘ will scare the socks off of you, but it builds some fairly good suspense throughout until its reveal, which will have you thinking back to the very beginning of the film and everything you’ve seen up until then.
It’s a shame and very sad that director Marcin Wrona suddenly passed away less than a week ago from writing this review, because if this film ‘Demon‘ is any pre-cursor for what he could have done behind the camera, we would have seen greatness.
Recommended!
– Bryan Kluger