All by Eric Botts
The film takes place over the wedding and reception of a Polish woman and a British-born Polish man. Before the wedding, Piotr discovers a skeleton buried in the yard behind their new home, the old house Żaneta inherited from her grandfather. 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.
Everything in Eraserhead folds back on the protagonist, Henry Spencer. Every disturbing image, grating sound, jarring scene change, and bizarre dialogue tells us what’s happening in the film and what’s happening in his head, a terrible, body-horror inflected vision of paternal postpartum depression.
Spontaneous combines gallows humor and whiplashing tonal shifts to pile on emotional intensity, capturing two-plus decades of ongoing trauma on two generations of children the United States has failed to protect from mass shootings due to its own systemic incompetence and lack of political will. The film leaves you numb, reflecting the effect of personal and national trauma, as well as the necessity of overcoming it.
