Dis­cov­er the haunt­ing tragedy of this Pol­ish pos­ses­sion horror

Adapt­ed by direc­tor Marcin Wrona and his co-writer Pawel Maslona from Piotr Rowicki’s 2008 play ​‘Adher­ence’, Demon opens with two images: a dig­ger being dri­ven at dawn through streets so utter­ly desert­ed that they might as well be in a ghost town; and a man being tak­en on a small fer­ry across a riv­er. ​“Isn’t there a bridge around here?” are his, and the film’s, first words.

The man is Piotr (Itay Tiran), a Lon­don­er return­ing to his Pol­ish moth­er­land to mar­ry local girl Zane­ta (Agniesz­ka Zulews­ka) in her home­town. Once off the fer­ry, Piotr meets Zaneta’s father Zyg­mond (Andrzej Grabows­ki) for the first time in per­son. Zyg­mond owns a quar­ry – a mas­sive hole in the ground – which he calls ​“My Pol­ish El Dora­do”, and he has sent one of his dig­gers to help Piotr pre­pare the old barn which had once belonged to Zaneta’s late grand­fa­ther, and which is where the wed­ding is due to take place. Piotr in turn offers to design a new bridge when he set­tles in – the old one, we lat­er learn, hav­ing been destroyed by the Ger­mans in World War Two.

Like any bride or groom, Piotr is him­self a kind of bridge, ford­ing a con­nec­tion between a family’s tra­di­tions and its future. Piotr hopes to build anew on the old grounds of the barn, using ​“the orig­i­nal bricks” to cre­ate a mod­ern home. But as he attempts, while alone at the site on the eve of the wed­ding, to dig a swim­ming pool in the grass, he uncov­ers a human skele­ton, exhum­ing a secret part of his new family’s history.

Dig­ging and bridge-build­ing are key motifs in Demon, with its (failed) rec­on­cil­i­a­tions to a buried past. Much as the local doc­tor (Adam Woronow­icz) keeps insist­ing that he is tee­to­tal even as he furtive­ly gets drunk from a hid­den flask, Zanuta’s fam­i­ly, indeed the whole com­mu­ni­ty, is in a sort of col­lec­tive denial. And when Piotr becomes pos­sessed by the spir­it of the Jew­ish girl Hana who had mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished from the area decades ear­li­er, Zyg­mond and his son Jas­ny (Tomasz Schuchardt) pre­fer, as always, to con­ceal from pub­lic view this uncom­fort­able recur­sion of the past and to lock Piotr (now speak­ing Yid­dish in a high-pitched voice) away in the cel­lar, rather than to dig fur­ther and to expose the awful truth.

“The whole country’s built on corpses,” Zyg­mond will lat­er protest, as he tries to stop Zane­ta doing her own dig­ging, and with these words he reveals the film’s sta­tus as nation­al alle­go­ry. For here Wrona is unfold­ing not just a mur­der mys­tery, but also a para­ble of the Holo­caust, as the micro­cosm of a Pol­ish town­ship proves unwill­ing to face up to both its own com­plic­i­ty in and prof­it from the his­toric exter­mi­na­tion of its Jew­ish pop­u­lace. ​“Per­haps it’s a good thing that it’s rain­ing,” says the old Jew­ish teacher Szy­mon Wentz (Wlodz­imierz Press) in his wed­ding speech – that every­one ignores – on the impor­tance of cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry to the main­te­nance of human­i­ty, ​“because it reminds us of the tears of despair, of which there were many more than tears of joy.”

Demon is not just set in a lot of rain and mud, but is slip­pery in oth­er ways. Its very title, and its themes of pos­ses­sion and exor­cism, might sug­gest the hor­ror genre, but the ghost­ly pres­ence of Hana (Maria Deb­s­ka) – her black hair in stark con­trast with the sea of blonde around her – is meek, con­fused and lost, and threat­en­ing only in what her hushed-up death sug­gests about the foun­da­tions of Zaneta’s fam­i­ly for­tune. In the mean­time, the super­nat­ur­al mate­r­i­al is con­fined (both metaphor­i­cal­ly and lit­er­al­ly) to the back­ground, while most of the film plays out like a car­ni­va­lesque, Kus­turi­cian com­e­dy of man­ners, as we observe the wed­ding par­ty grad­u­al­ly descend­ing into drunk­en chaos.

Demon comes with a hole – again both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal – at its cen­tre. For the nar­ra­tive here is rid­dled with ellipses, as it dances around a dis­ap­pear­ance (or two) with­out ever ful­ly stat­ing – although cer­tain­ly hint­ing at – what lies beneath the struc­ture of its repeat­ing his­to­ries. This is a por­trait of Poland as a not-so-sweet lit­tle vil­lage, unable to move on from small-town xeno­pho­bia against Jews like Hana or mod­ern out­siders like Piotr, even as its unre­solved past returns, like a dyb­buk, to rein­hab­it the present – only to be buried, rather than redressed, once more.

“We are sad, because Python has died,” says Jas­ny of the com­ing wed­ding, using the old nick­name of his play­mate and soon-to-be broth­er-in-law, ​“and in his place has been born Piotr.” From its open­ing, when, en route on the fer­ry (a ves­sel freight­ed with Sty­gian asso­ci­a­tions) to get mar­ried, Piotr sees a woman, pos­sessed with grief, wad­ing man­i­cal­ly in the water, Demon con­stant­ly plays upon the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty, even the par­al­lelism, between wed­ding and funer­al – the one a com­mit­ment to the future, the oth­er to the past.

The cel­e­bra­to­ry mood of the mar­riage is con­stant­ly dis­rupt­ed by death – whether Piotr’s inaus­pi­cious dis­cov­ery of the skele­ton, or the teacher Szymon’s speech, or Hana’s return from the grave. There is even an actu­al funer­al, glimpsed every so often, tak­ing place con­cur­rent­ly with the wed­ding. Sad­ly, this per­sis­tent fix­a­tion on loss and mor­tal­i­ty was also to per­vade the film’s imme­di­ate after­life. For on 19 Sep­tem­ber, 2015, while attend­ing the Gdy­nia Pol­ish Film Fes­ti­val where Demon screened in com­pe­ti­tion, Wrona hanged him­self, aged 42, leav­ing behind his own new bride (and the film’s exec­u­tive pro­duc­er) Olga Szy­man­s­ka. Per­haps the only con­so­la­tion for such a tragedy is this haunt­ing buried treasure.

The DVD of Demon is released by Sharp Teeth Films on 28 May.