Demon movie review & film summary (2016)

Like most horror films, "Demon" is a morality play, one that concerns society's tendency of selectively erasing its past. English groom Piotr (Itay Tyran) insists on marrying his Polish bride Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska) on a rural plot of land she inherited from her grandfather Staszek. Zaneta's father did not build the barn that PIotr and Zaneta's wedding takes place in, but that doesn't really matter to the young couple: they want a traditional wedding. This is partly a defensive maneuver since their courtship was swift, and Zaneta's parents, Zofia and Zygmunt (Katarzyna Gniewkowska and Andrzej Grabowski, respectively) are at least mildly xenophobic: Zofia drunkenly asks (no one in particular) why her daughter couldn't find a nice Polish boy to marry while Zygmunt frankly tells Piotr "I don't know you."

Piotr and Zaneta's nuptials are further complicated after he stumbles upon a skeleton in a muddy sinkhole. Nobody else sees the skeleton, but Piotr insists that he saw something, and it wasn't an animal's remains. Recently-deceased co-writer/director Marcin Wrona initially focuses on Piotr's transformation: we watch as the eager-to-please foreigner tries to dance, drink, and joke his way into the spirit of things. But while Piotr's in-laws may not be as preoccupied by giggling children, a mysterious woman in black, and epileptic fits, Piotr eventually loses control of himself after he's possessed by a dybbuk, a Yiddish vampire that possesses a human body and attaches itself to its host's soul. Piotr may want to take care of his problems, but his new family must ultimately take care of him.

Here's where things get dryly funny and increasingly direful: Zaneta's family don't want to postpone the wedding. Zygmunt hides Piotr and tries to get a rational-minded priest, a pill-pushing doctor and a doddering Jewish professor to look at him. Of these three unwise men, only Professor Szymon Wentz (Wlodzimierz Press) is patient and open-minded enough to talk to Piotr. He's been possessed by Hana, a Yiddish-speaking woman who used to live in Staszek's village decades ago. Szymon is besides himself: he used to pine for this woman when he was younger. But now she's gone, and doesn't even know it. Too bad nobody listens to Szymon, a stammering academic who is practically laughed off-stage when he delivers his wedding toast. 

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