52 Pick-Up # 41 – Demon (2015)

Hey there! Welcome back!

Pay no mind to the body in the back. In fact, just pretend I never mentioned a body back there and let's get on with a nice, orderly entry in this year long dive into a cinematic to do list.

Okay, that played a little better than the warm-up gag for Enemy, so there's that.

October rolls on with a slate of horror movies lined up for this month, and this week I'm changing gears and countries for a darkly comic slice of Polish folk horror.

So, without further ado...

Demon introduces us to Piotr (Itay Tiran), a Polish man working abroad who has returned to his home country, where he is about to marry Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska.) Alongside marrying into the family, Piotr is also moving into an old estate that had previously belonged to Żaneta's grandmother. While working on some renovation ahead of the wedding, Piotr makes a strange find buried in the yard.

Okay, maybe a human skeleton is more than 'strange', but at the time, he initially decides not to tell about it. Which seems like a good idea at first. Then as the wedding is underway, Piotr starts to behave strangely. What follows is one part a slow burning tale of possession, one part an absurdly black comedy of manners, and one part a story about the way the past tends to come back despite the best efforts of others to silence it.

As a horror movie, this is an odd one to classify in a few respects. There's elements of a ghost story, a possession story, a folk tale (the nature of the spirit is ties into Jewish folklore, and that's all I'll say lest I give too much away), and, yes, again, dark comedy. It never feels like it leans too especially far into any one or the other. To be honest, part of why my instinct is to put it under folk comes from my first viewing of this care of the fact my copy is part of Severin's All the Haunts Be Ours folk horror collections.

That weird classification is part of what really made an impression on me while watching this and kept me interested. While there were elements I could see were being set up, there was never a sense of being able to predict just where some elements were going. Especially with regards to the subplot involving Żaneta's father (Andrzej Grabowski) and his increasingly more harried attempts to downplay his son-in-law's growing erratic behavior, resorting to ever more outlandish ways to keep the guests distracted.

Alongside this very dark comedy, the movie has a quietly somber thread with regards to the nature of the dead body found. Again, I'm trying not to get too specific for spoilers, but in light of the country in question and the time period the deceased is placed around, there is a historical subtext that becomes hard to ignore, especially given some of the political sentiments Poland has been embracing in the past decade and change. The idea of Poland trying to downplay its past sins, unearthed by chance and a relative outsider, is a striking and surprisingly sobering theme, and it's impressive how well the movie balances it with the absurdity.

On the sobering note, there is one other thing about this movie that feels hard to not bring up, that is the death of its director, Marcin Wrona. Without going into too much detail on it, looking into the director's background, found out it was reported that he hanged himself after completing this movie, making it his final feature. While a quick search did not give any indication to the reasons for the suicide, it's a detail that makes parts of this movie land differently, particularly with regards to what becomes of Piotr as the movie unfolds. No definitive connections, but it's hard not to wonder with that knowledge.

As a horror movie, this isn't really one that will scratch the scary itch for the Halloween season. It presents an effective slow burn, but the supernatural elements more inspire thought than fear. I'm not saying this as a complaint, more a way to help adjust expectations for if anyone is interested in watching this. It's a horror, but not in the ways you'd expect.

For those who this may be disappointing to? Don't worry, next week brings us back to some more straightforward horror. I'm going into a nastier, more occult vein with a movie I've been circling for a while now in The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Till then.