DEMON. (2015) DIRECTED BY MARLIN WRONA. STARRING ITAY TIRAN, AGNIESZKA ZULEWSKA, ANDRZEI GRABOWSKI, TOMASZ SCHUCHARDT AND MARIA DEBSKA.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
ON DVD 28 MAY 2018
'Let's not go all abracadabra here.'
'Is it possible that the spirit of a dead person can appear before us...?'
'THE CLINGING: the Jewish tradition of the soul of a dead person 'clinging' to that of a living person to finish what death interrupted. They think, I'm dead, but it's not true...'
Oh wow. This is an absolute cracker of a Polish horror film, and the sad thing about it is that I understand the director is deceased now. I'd dearly love to tell him how much I love his film! It's not so much that it's scary as that it's extremely well-done, well-acted and well-scripted, so not only is it Polish but it's also highly-polished, lol, if you see what I did there.
Okay, so two attractive young Jewish-Polish people, Piotr and Zaneta, are about to get married. They haven't known each other for very long- I think it's only a month- but they're head-over-heels in lust. Ooops, sorry, of course I meant love, snigger snigger.
They're going to live in Zaneta's grandfather's house that he built himself. Zaneta's family are a wealthy and prominent family in the little rural Polish village where they live. On the day before the wedding, Piotr arrives from England to see his beautiful blonde bride (why are Polish women always so gorgeous? They make us Irish chicks look like sacks of crap!) and look over the bridal house, which still needs a lot of work doing to it before it can be properly habitable.
Piotr finds something very strange in the ground near his new home on the day before the wedding. It's obviously been there for a long time and no-one but Piotr knows it's there. From the time that he sees this thing in the earth, Piotr undergoes a subtle change, a change that becomes highly evident to the wedding guests over the course of the next couple of days. Yeah, Polish weddings go on forever, lol...!
The wedding party is amazing. There's traditional Polish singing and dancing, in various stages of sobriety I might add, and any guests who fancy getting up and belting out a bit of an auld tune are free to do so. There's glass-breaking and vodka-swilling and horny couples getting off with each other, even to the point of having sex openly outside the reception hall. Up agin the wall and everything. Now that's what I call a proper wedding...
The handsome, dark-haired Piotr becomes more and more divorced from reality as the reception marches on. He keeps seeing a strange woman there who stares at him intently. Well, he's drop-dead gorgeous, so women are naturally gonna ogle him, but it's more than that. She's looking at him as if she knows him. Does she? And why does he seem to know that she's called Hana?
The beautiful Zaneta is not impressed by the groom's slip of the tongue during his wedding speech, in which he refers to his bride as 'Hana.' Oh shit. Remember FRIENDS? 'I, Ross, take thee Rachel...!' Ross's marriage to posh English Emily fell apart because of it. It doesn't look like Zaneta is prepared to be any more forgiving, haha. Saying the right name, either during the ceremony or in the after-speeches, is positively imperative if you want your nuts to remain, ahem, intact and uncracked...
Piotr's increasingly bizarre behaviour ruins the wedding. While a terrible (but visually stunning) rain-storm lashes the reception hall overnight, Piotr has seizures and begins to talk in foreign languages and it becomes increasingly obvious that he's being possessed. But by whom, and why?
Rod and Todd Flanders from THE SIMPSONS talked in 'tongues' too, but that was because their Dad Ned didn't believe in vaccinations and so they each got the 'flu and became delirious, lol. As much as their holy-roller father would have liked to believe that they were speaking in tongues like from the Bible, sadly they were merely hallucinating.
Zaneta's father-in-law is a brilliant character. When Piotr starts 'fitting' in front of the guests, he's all, like, 'It's just epilepsy, nothing serious!' He tries to keep a lid on Piotr's outlandish behaviour as best he can by desperately filling the guests full of booze so that they're less inclined to notice what's going on around them. Well, we know they're pissed, but they're not that pissed...!
He also lays into his son Jasny, Zaneta's brother, for allowing his sister to wed such an unsuitable husband. But Jasny says, hang on a minute, I don't know him any better than you guys do! Don't be blaming me if Piotr turns out to be a fruitcake, in other words.
Tempers are frayed between the two men and, in the meantime, why is a bedraggled and rain-soaked Zaneta, still in her by-now-ruined wedding dress, digging up the garden near her grandfather's house in the pitch-dark and the lashing rain? Whatever she's doing, it doesn't bode well for the future of Piotr and Zaneta. Could this marriage turn out to be the shortest nuptials on record? It might just be, if the ghost controlling Piotr's mind has anything to do with it...
Eerie Polish thriller DEMON gets a UK DVD release from Sharp Teeth Films on 28 May 2018.
After screening to enthusiastic festival audiences worldwide, we are delighted to bring this haunting and unusual ghost story to the UK. DEMON is a rare telling of a Jewish folk myth laced with horror and dark humour, based on the play Przylgnięcie (Clinging) by Piotr Rowicki and directed by the late Marcin Wrona.
Winner of ‘Best Horror Feature’ at Fantastic Fest and featuring a film score by renowned Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (THE EXORCIST, THE SHINING, INLAND EMPIRE) this is an intriguing story that will 'cling' to your memory long after viewing.
Winner of ‘Best Horror Feature’ at Fantastic Fest and featuring a film score by renowned Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (THE EXORCIST, THE SHINING, INLAND EMPIRE) this is an intriguing story that will 'cling' to your memory long after viewing.
Cultural nightmares from the past again prove to make unforgettable and thought-provoking stories, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the Dybbuk.
Genre: Horror, thriller, comedy | Year: 2015 | Cert: 15 | Country: Poland
Language: Polish, Yiddish and English | Subtitles: English | Running Time: 94 mins
Language: Polish, Yiddish and English | Subtitles: English | Running Time: 94 mins
Directed by: Marcin Wrona
Screenplay by: Pawel Maslona, Marcin Wrona
Cast: Itay Tiran, Agnieszka Zulewska, Andrzej Grabowski, Tomasz Schuchardt
DVD special features: Photo Gallery, Trailers
Marcin Wrona was an accomplished director, scriptwriter, producer and a member of the Polish Film Academy. In 2002, his short film MAGNET MAN won Best Student Film Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. His first feature MY FLESH MY BLOOD premiered at Rome Film festival in 2009 and went on to win numerous awards. His second feature THE CHRISTENING (2010) screened at film festivals worldwide and was universally acclaimed. DEMON was his third film and a Polish-Israeli co-production.
Marcin also directed several well-received TV dramas (including Harold Pinter's COLLECTION and THE MORALITY OF MRS. DULSKA). During the European Film Awards ceremony in Barcelona 2004, he presented his short film TELEFONO which was later included in Pedro Almodovar's DVD collection. In the 2013 he directed the musical Chopin Must Die which premiered simultaneously in Warsaw and London. Marcin sadly passed away in 2015 at the age of 42 years.
About Sharp Teeth Films:
Sharp Teeth Films promises to bring a taste of the unusual to UK audiences via cinema, DVD and VOD releases. Our carefully selected line-up includes a mix of languages and genres, with a focus on standout stories that are both provocative and fascinating … films with ‘bite’. The first releases include New York sub-culture documentary RUBBLE KINGS, highlighting the true story behind cult classic The Warriors, ‘holiday from hell’ horror SHOPPING TOUR, a thought-provoking, cannibal satire and YOU ARE NOT ALONE, a first-person POV thriller seen from the perspective of the 'final girl'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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