I remember watching Demon alone very late one night, as I often start movies after midnight. When I came to bed, I woke my sleeping wife out of a nightmare she was having; she was being chased by Nazis, but could not remember why. She quickly fell back to sleep, but I laid awake thinking about the Marcin Wrona’s haunting movie. The movies I see do not usually keep me up, but Demon is not a typical movie and there were questions I wanted answered. It took about 90 minutes rolling around in bed before I had that eureka moment. I had an epiphany and suddenly every question I had about the film was answered. I had solved its puzzle and reflected on how well constructed it was. (By telling me about her dream, my wife may have inexplicably helped.) I fell asleep shortly afterwards satisfied, having no doubt that I had just watched a masterpiece.

Demon is a hidden gem to anyone willing to take the time to understand it. (Please take the time to research online if you don’t.) Its secrets, which deal with a nation’s guilt, hid in plain sight. It is also the only story I know where barely referenced characters who are said to be long dead end up as important to the story as the ones we watch in the present.

And it is also the best wedding movie I have ever seen.

Demon is the story of Piotr, a man who meets his soon-to-be bride’s father for the first time days before their wedding in Poland. As a wedding present, he inherits the land that was owned by his wife’s grandfather, but while digging a hole on the property before the wedding, he unearths a human skeleton. Knowing the wedding is soon to take place on this property, Piotr is left with a tough choice: does he stay quiet about the skeleton until after the wedding, or does he let the authorities know, which will undoubtedly turn the wedding site into a crime scene. Obviously, Piotr chooses the former, but this turns out to have unfortunate supernatural consequences. The story itself is a twist on the Jewish legend about the dybbuk, a wandering spirit meant to possess souls in order to right wrongdoings. But Demon refuses to play out so predictably.

Traditional horror fans are unlikely to like Demon. It has scares, but they come in the first half of the film. The film relies more on dark humour after the wedding begins in its second act. What should be the happiest day of his life among friends turns into a private battle against an impossible assailant. 

But the film is at its most brilliant in its final act, when the story turns its attention to the wedding guests. Because of his Polish roots, Wrona is often compared to Roman Polanski, but the magic and symbolism in the film’s final scenes feel more like Ingmar Bergman. I can think of no other horror film that ends this way. It is both tragic and beautiful, but also seemingly ambiguous. The ending defies our expectations and makes us question the outcome, at least, until we realize that Wrona sprinkled enough breadcrumbs throughout the movie to concretely answer all of our lingering questions. (In this way, Demon is a bit like The Wailing, only in the Korean film, the realization comes in knowing it can never be fully understood.)

Sadly, the rumor is that filming Demon put Marcin Wrona in a very dark place. Wrona, who openly suffered from depression, took his life while promoting the film at Poland’s Gdynia Film Festival after the film failed to receive an award. But, in truth, the film, which has also been a part of a negative vote bombing campaign on IMDb, after being considered by many Polish people as being too damning of its countrymen. For Polish citizens of a certain age, the film holds no ambiguity and would possibly strike a painful, damning nerve.

Demon delivers a powerful statement about how past crimes continue to impact future generations and, more importantly, how a community will continue to function with complicity if it protects itself from outsiders. It is a mature, adult horror; the kind The Midnight Selections was created to support. It is not a traditional horror or possession story. It is something much, much better.

It is also one of my favourite films. There just has never been another film like it.