BEWARE SPOILERS

We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the films being discussed.

Demon (2015) is available on tubi as of this writing (6/30/2021).

A common thread among social thrillers, from The Stepford Wives to Get Out to Parasite, is their fixation on cultural oppression, social injustice, and in the case of the late Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015), cultural division and mass murder. Demon is a colossus of a film, first because of the weight of its subject matter--the murder of Polish Jews by other Poles during World War II--and second because of Wrona’s tragic suicide while promoting the film in September 2015 at Poland’s Gdynia Film Festival.

The film takes place over the wedding and reception of Żaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska), a Polish woman, and Piotr (Itay Tiran), a British-born Polish man, in a small Polish town. Before the wedding, Piotr discovers a human skeleton buried in the yard behind their future home, the old house Żaneta inherited from her grandfather.

After that, the spirit of a young woman begins to haunt Piotr, eventually possessing his body during the reception. The spirit, it turns out, is a dybbuk--in Jewish lore, an often malevolent, disembodied human soul that can latch onto the living. But this spirit’s not evil. She’s lost and confused and has taken Piotr’s body because, “He is my lover, the one I was promised.”

She refuses to believe that she’s long dead and that her life, as the Professor (Wlodzimierz Press) eventually explains, “no longer exists. Neither do you. … Your family doesn’t exist.”

Over the chaotic all-night reception, it becomes clear that Żaneta’s grandfather had something to do with the dead body and that more than a few people at this reception know or suspect more about it than they’re letting on. Demon is about a terrible truth that these wedding guests and many Poles want to forget, one that persists in the bones under the very soil of Poland itself.

A Wedding Between Two Funerals

Early in the film, immediately after the ceremony, as Piotr, Żaneta, Jasny (Tomasz Schuchardt), and another member of the wedding party are riding in a car to the reception, the four of them are laughing, shouting, and high-fiving when Piotr looks out the window at a woman with a priest and another man who’ve clearly just come from a funeral.

The woman stares eerily at the passing party, ignoring whatever the priest is saying to her. She seems confused and hurt to see such celebration after the death of her loved one. The camera quickly cuts back to the car, and the upbeat Klezmer music fades into the background and slows to a muddy slog as it’s overtaken by squealing and grating disharmonic noise.

And yet, the partying doesn’t stop. Jasny pops open a bottle of champagne and sprays it all over the car. Piotr and Żaneta pull themselves halfway out the windows of the moving vehicle. Piotr takes a large swig from the bottle, and they shout their joy to the world. Even as the wedding party puts the image of the funeral behind them, though, the lingering noise won’t let audiences lose the anxiety it’s introduced.

But then we cut to the reception. When Piotr stomps on an emptied glass of vodka--a nod to the Jewish wedding tradition of breaking the glass--the noise stops abruptly. Żaneta laughs at him, says, “Not like that,” and lets out a squeal of delight as she honors the Polish wedding tradition of tossing her glass over her shoulder and letting it smash to the floor. From that follows much dancing and music and drinking.

This is the first time we see the wedding butted up against a funeral. The second and final time comes near the film’s end, the morning after the reception. After an evening of seizures and speaking in tongues, of exploding lights and electrical fires, of wrathful weather and baffled holy men; after a night of buried bodies and a groom claiming to be a Jewish woman named Hana (Maria Dębska), who had been murdered some seven decades ago in this very village; after a raucous party amid and in spite of the terror unfolding around them, the wedding guests begin to sober up.

They drunkenly help one another up a muddy hill, heading toward the road and into the midst of a funeral procession. A woman leads the processioners on foot behind the hearse. She slows and lifts her widow’s veil, her jaw hanging open at the indignity of this moment: as she escorts her husband’s corpse to the grave, a night of drunken, debauched celebration rises up the hill like a stench.

She lowers her veil and continues on until a wedding guest, apparently unaware of the funeral into which she is walking, bumps into the widow and keeps walking, still blind, deaf, and literally unfeeling to the death and grief through which she moves. A second guest nearly bumps into her as well. She stops and apologizes as a third guest locks eyes on the widow, then the hearse and the rest of the procession. The guest clasps a hand over her mortified mouth.

These two moments define the setting of Demon, its time, its place, and its context--the events happening around the main story. Piotr and Żaneta’s wedding disrupts and ignores two separate funerals. Most of the wedding guests also ignore the disappearance of Piotr himself, who has been murdered by Ronaldo (Tomasz Ziętek), a friend of Jasny’s and “a clever boy.”

Only the Professor, the Doctor (Adam Woronowicz), and Żaneta herself seem distraught over Piotr’s disappearance. Żaneta’s father (Andrzej Grabowski), on the other hand, does all he can to deny any reality that would disrupt the celebration or suggest his father’s involvement with the human remains found on the property. And Żaneta’s brother Jasny reinforces their father’s denials, helping him manage the evolving narrative of her wedding and her husband’s disappearance.

“Goodbye, Pyton. Hello, Piotr. Amen.”

Demon is a story about a culture in denial of its own violent history, and it tells that story in a series of well-wishes, toasts, eulogies, and wedding announcements, beginning with a speech, in English, from Piotr’s future brother-in-law Jasny. He addresses Piotr in front of Ronaldo:

Today we say goodbye to a friend. We are sad because Pyton [a variation of Piotr] has died, and in his place has been born Piotr. He’s got the slippers and the TV remotes and the morning paper. We can smell bacon and eggs. Pyton, how many times you showed us how hard you are? How many times we shitted ourselves? But you fought bravely only to die in battle. [He pauses.] Goodbye, Pyton. Hello, Piotr. Amen.

A person’s death and rebirth anew is a common metaphor used during weddings and other major life events, but the military language toward the end and the context of Jasny’s speech make it strangely ominous. I can’t speak to the significance of the tattoos on his neck or to his undershave haircut in Polish culture, but to my American eye, they suggest white supremacy and neo-Nazi leanings.

More than that, Piotr, just the night before, had found human remains in the backyard of Jasny’s grandfather’s home. And in addition to marrying Żaneta, Piotr is leaving his birth country for his ancestral homeland, giving the speech a nationalist undertone.

Over the course of the film, we’re led to suspect that Jasny, Ronaldo, or both of them later took the remains from the backyard. This seems the most rational explanation. But regardless of whether they removed the skeleton or Piotr dug it up himself in a possessed black-out or it just vanished or it was in Piotr’s head all along, Jasny and Ronaldo both act as if they’re hiding something about the skeleton and about Jasny’s grandfather. And both seem eager to deny that the skeleton is human, that it even exists.

“Something Polish”

Adding to the nationalist and antisemitic undertones, the wedding guests are dismissive and even hostile toward the Professor, an old Jewish man who survived the slaughter of his Jewish neighbors. Speaking from the stage, he says,

Here, bravely, let me recall Stach, your grandfather, Żaneta. He once said, “Just wait thirty or forty years. We won’t have much of it, but our grandchildren will.” He said it somewhere near here, right by this marquee. I mean the marquee wasn’t there then, but when you leave the house, it’s on the northwest side…

As he seems to veer off toward a tangential description of the old neighborhood, the guests show their impatience. Most return to their food. A few fix exasperated glares on him. They’re not interested in an old man’s reveries. They want food and drink, music (Polish music), and dance. The Professor goes on:

Of course, Staszek wanted Żaneta to inherit this house. It was his last will. It’s a good bit of land. I confirm it. I know a thing or two. Listen to an old Jew. I can still do my math.

A member of the wedding party approaches him from behind, his eyes fixed coldly as he prepares to drag the old man from the mic, but Żaneta’s father waves him off, as the Professor continues: “Perhaps it’s good that it’s raining because it reminds us of the tears of despair, of which there were many more than tears of joy.” A solitary guest raises his hands to clap with approval, as the rest either ignore the Professor entirely or harang him: “We aren’t in school now!”

I know, I know. Maybe it’s not the time. But on the other hand, as Aristotle said, “Whoever does not partake of society is either a god or a beast. There is no man without society, and there’s no society without memory.

Żaneta’s father rises and shuffles him offstage, quickly replacing him with the middle-aged Doctor, who sits at a keyboard to play Frédéric Chopin’s “Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28, No. 4”--a sorrowful, even funereal piece. Someone yells, “Play something Polish,” loudly announcing the drunken nationalism of the room. Another hollers, “Something funny!”

(As it turns out, Chopin was Polish-born to a Polish mother and French father. He was also an avowed Polish nationalist who’s been accused at various points of betraying his country, of being too effeminate, and of being an antisemite. I don’t have enough room here to unpack those accusations, but back in 2009, Michael Church wrote a pretty fascinating article on Chopin for The Independent.)

My point, though, is that Demon’s critique isn’t far below the surface in this scene. I’m unclear whether the Doctor, like the Professor, is Jewish, but the sheer ignorance at work in the heckler’s comment speaks volumes. Immediately after the Professor has pleaded with the audience--remember the past because it keeps us human--this man shouts, “Play something Polish!” during a performance of an aggressively nationalistic and possibly antisemitic Polish composer maligned for supposed treason and for not being manly enough.

These guests, it seems, are either gods or beasts. They have no patience for an “old Jew’s” nostalgia for the old village or his entreaty that they remember its many “tears of sorrow.” No patience for melancholy music meant to soothe old pains, as the Doctor jokes, “better than Aspirin, better even than Prozac.” They’ve forgotten the old pains of this village and the skeletons it’s built on.

Forgotten Sins of the Father

Throughout Demon, Żaneta’s father continually insists that the guests have not seen what they’ve seen, that all is well, that the dancing and drinking and music must continue in the face of a skeleton discovered on the property, of an apparent epileptic seizure, of monstrous weather events, of a man claiming to be a girl who died seventy years ago.

He tries to control the narrative. He tells Piotr, Jasny, and Ronaldo to keep their mouths shut about the skeleton. He first tells the guests Piotr’s bizarre behavior is the result of food poisoning (but not from the wedding catering, to be clear), then he says it was a seizure, then that Piotr is a madman. And the next morning, after Piotr has disappeared and the guests are waking up from the floor and from their chairs and tables, he staggers to the stage and picks the mic up from the floor:

Dear guests, go back to your homes and sleep in peace. We’ll wake up tomorrow. When… When we open our eyes, everything will be clear to us. We just have to sleep it off. We must forget what we didn’t see here. Because… Because what we were eye-wittnesses to was only the effect of collective hallucination. We think we took part in it, but we only think we did.

The camera cuts to the room full of exhausted, slumping bodies, some of them staggering as they dance together to the music-less speech. He continues:

I’m dreaming you. And you’re dreaming me. It’s quite simply just a collective dream. A dream in a dream. In fact there never was a wedding. You weren’t here. I wasn’t here. Neither isn’t there a groom. And there never was.

The camera turns back to him as he counts in Russian, like he’s conjuring his words into reality, “One, two, three.” The camera cuts back, and only Żaneta is in the room. She sits alone, staring at her father as if she’s realized what he is for the first time: a charlatan who erases history with words; not a man or a beast, but a dark god who bends truth to his will.

A Wedding Eulogy

Once Piotr has been fully possessed, the Professor’s memory--his knowledge of Yiddish and his recollection of Hana and the old village--allows him to identify the dybbuk as Hana and to communicate and connect with her. At first, he speaks to her of the past, but in the present tense: “I’m Szymon Wentz. I live in the house by the river.” Then he tells her, as if to say that his memory is not enough to overcome the terrible truth of her disappearance, “Other people are being born and dying. … [Your family] no longer exists. Neither do you.”

Near the end of the film, after Piotr has disappeared, Żaneta and the Professor ride together in the backseat of a car as the Professor begins again to speak of the old village. The butcher’s place “used to be a synagogue,” he recalls.

Every day at dawn the tsaddik walked here. Twelve kilometers from the village. He washed in the mitzvah before entering the synagogue so he could touch the Torah and read the holy words. All came to him for blessings: Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics.

He points out where the old businesses used to be. He remembers three girls who used to walk to school, Hana’s sisters. Echoing the moment from his speech when he went off-topic to recall the location of the marquee, it seems as if he’s again lost the thread. But then he says, “That was my whole world. Almost nothing is left. Only what’s in the memory.” 

He’s not veering off-topic. The old village, the way it looked, the people who lived there, Hana and her sisters--they are the point. Taken together, nearly all of the Professor’s dialogue amounts to a eulogy for the world he lost, for an undivided Poland, for his murdered neighbors.

And only in this final speech does someone listen. At the end of the film, as the hungover guests stagger toward the road, as Ronaldo disposes of Piotr’s car (and presumably his body), and as someone demolishes the old house, the camera cuts to Żaneta standing silently, wearing Piotr’s jacket as she rides the ferry away from the village. Unlike the others at this wedding, she chooses to remember what has happened, to remember Piotr and Hana and the Professor’s old world and the “many more tears of sorrow than tears of joy” that soak the ground of her home.