Polish cinema has never really been fond of genre stories, and has often struggled to link styles seemingly unrelated to one another. But Marcin Wrona has managed it. His film Demon is an excellent marriage of horror and comedy, ostensibly dressed up as a genre costume story about Poland and Poles.
Wrona's picture begins as classic horror. A young man (Ilkay Tiran) comes to a small Polish town. He is supposed to marry a Polish woman (Agnieszka Żulewska) he met in the British Isles, and then renovate a house – a gift from his father-in-law (Andrzej Grabowski). As Piotr prepares for the renovation, he comes across human remains. Nobody can explain where they came from, nor are they particularly interested in his discovery. The whole matter could probably have been ignored, but then Piotr sees the ghost of a Jewish girl at his wedding.
In his last film, Wrona fuses The Wedding / Wesele by Smarzowski and the classic Dybuk by Szymon An-ski. It’s a film constructed from anxiety, shivers and ambiguity. The trivial is linked with the metaphysical. Wrona, whose previous films were considered to be grounded in realism, invites his audience this time on a tour of the world of fantasy and horror. But this choice is not escapist – when talking about the supernatural world, the director is also talking about modern Poland and its own demons.
Poland is portrayed in Demon as a country built on graves that we wish to forget, a country of robbed Jewish fortunes and forgotten old neighbours. It is the home of a well-embalmed collective memory. In the final scene, a character played by Andrzej Grabowski asks guests to forget about the wedding and believe that the evening was nothing more than a nightmare. Wrona puts symbolic weight into this monologue, connecting it with the Polish way of thinking about the Holocaust. His film is about displacing from our memories those inconvenient thoughts that destroy our idealised image of the national community. This final scene brings to mind Somersault directed by Tadeusz Konwicki – Wrona's horror, just like Sennik Współczesny and its adaptation Somersault, is a story about national illusions and communities built upon false myths.
