It is the ghost-season of the Gregorian calendar and the middle of the Days of Awe. I have been wanting to write about Marcin Wrona's Demon (2015) ever since I saw it in May as part of the National Center for Jewish Film's annual festival at the MFA. Now seems as good a time as any. It's the best dybbuk film made in any country since 1937.
Loosely adapted from Piotr Rowicki's stage play Adherence/The Clinging (Przylgnięcie, 2008) and taking cues from Jewish folklore as well as An-sky's seminal play, Demon is, like every effective possession, more than one thing at once, encompassing a poignant ghost story, a romantic tragedy, a black comedy, and a scalding indictment of the failure of historical memory, specifically in the director's native Poland. Pay attention to the opening image—a front loader trundling through the misty, empty streets of an antique-looking town is an obvious symbol of excavation and construction, but it can be used just as easily for covering up and tearing down. One does not preclude the other. Building can be a form of erasure, depending on what's under the foundations. Everything in the film will be this ambivalent, its protagonist included.
The action begins with a ferry rounding the bend of a wide, flat river, a young man leaning on the rail. This is Piotr (Itay Tiran, giving a powerhouse performance), nicknamed "Python." He has a clever, slightly clownish, youthfully leonine face, something of a tough air in his black leather jacket and jeans and boots, his dark hair cropped tight. He drives a Range Rover. He could be anyone. He's an engineer from London, come to Poland to marry his girlfriend in her rural home town; he knows his way around the loader left on the grounds of the ramshackle farmhouse he and his bride-to-be are inheriting as a fixer-upper gift from her father. The day before the wedding, the place looks like a derelict memory palace, its rain-faded walls still hung with clouded mirrors and glass-cracked photographs, its doorways scratched with heights and ages that Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) assumes must have belonged to her grandfather's family, though she's puzzled not to recognize all the names. They are a modern, international couple—they did most of their falling in love over Skype—but the Catholic blowout of the wedding is more than just a concession to her parochial parents (Andrzej Grabowski and Katarzyna Gniewkowska) who'd rather have seen her marry a nice homegrown Polish boy; tradition seems important to them, too, the past, roots, family. Żaneta's enthusiasm as she shows him around the property causes Piotr to tease that she's "more in love with this place than she is with me." She kisses him passionately in rebuttal while her brother Jasny (Tomasz Schuchardt) wraps them both in an affectionate embrace, two fair-haired kinfolk welcoming the dark stranger into their midst. When he fires up the loader to break ground on an ambitiously proposed swimming pool, already as confident as a homeowner, they leave him to it. They shouldn't have: in the next scoop of earth are bones. They look human. A troubled Piotr immediately drives over to tell his imminent in-laws, but the wedding preparations are so busy and so joyful—and his position as the groom from away still so contingent—that he can't bring himself to interrupt. He keeps the secret to himself, going out after dark with a flashlight to look again for the gravesite. He sees rain, trees, a human figure moving beyond the windows of the old house, kneeling with its back to him or standing somehow to its knees in the dark wet field; he's lured by its vagueness, drawn off into his own rain-scattered circle of light when he comes suddenly face-to-face with a dark-haired girl in white (Maria Dębska). For a moment he sees her clearly—her pale face, her antique wedding dress, her mouth and eyes as heavily shadowed as theatrical makeup—and then the earth liquefies beneath his feet. Black, depthless, it swallows him up.
He flails awake in the back seat of his car with his groomsmen banging on the windows, laughing at him for almost oversleeping his own wedding. He's a little disoriented, a little groggy, but Jasny greeted him yesterday with a bottle in hand and today they're getting started on the booze well ahead of the wedding celebrations. Flanked by the glowering but obedient Ronaldo (Tomasz Zietek), Jasny gives a toast in farewell to his wild London friend and greeting of the husband who's going to make his sister happy: "Python has died and in his place is born Piotr." The groom dresses distractedly—staring at his own hands, starting at a string of small children who seem to run from and to nowhere—but for the ceremony itself he is clear, focused, committed, sliding the ring onto Żaneta's finger and lifting her joyously in a swirl of white-blond hair and whiter veil. Arriving early at the barn out back of the farmhouse where the reception is to take place, the newlyweds even sneak off into a bedroom to consummate their marriage in a giggly, adolescent moment of stolen privacy before the hours of revelry and congratulation to come. Everyone who is familiar with the Ashkenazi post-wedding ritual of the yichud, please start your wondering. It is at the reception, however, that things really begin to derange. Żaneta flings her glass over her shoulder after a traditional toast; Piotr stamps on his, sharp and gleeful as a dancer, then seems puzzled both by his own reflex action and the crowd's lack of appropriate response. Making his first toast as a married man, he stumbles over Żaneta's name, substitutes the unfamiliar "Hana" instead. He dizzies in the dancing, finds himself spinning in the arms of the same dark-haired girl from last night's vision, who by the electric glare of the barn's bulb-hung rafters looks even less alive than she did standing over her own grave. He stammers. He faints. As his body convulses and his voice whoops through registers, the frantic parents of the bride blame vodka, food poisoning, epilepsy, schizophrenia, God knows what freakish foreign ailment, finally bundle him out of sight into the basement to give themselves time to think how best to salvage this scandalous disaster. Half-naked, his breast beating like a bird's, Piotr struggles against his bonds, glossolaling an eerie nonsense—unless, like the elderly teacher Szymon Wentz (Włodzimierz Press) whose erudite, self-deprecating, pointedly disregarded toast told the audience everything they needed to know about his token status in this community, the listener has some knowledge of other languages common in Poland before 1939–45. Piotr's body language is trembling, defiant, protective of its modesty. His voice lightens in his throat, his words catch farther back in it. Even his gold chain lies differently around his neck. He says his name is Hana; he says she lives in this house. Where is her family? Isn't this her wedding? Piotr is the man she was promised, her basherter. Szymon blinks back tears, addresses another question to this familiar spirit in strange flesh in a language he hasn't shared with anyone in seventy years. He knew her when she was alive—"Little Szymon," she recalls him, the tagalong younger brother of a boy she ran with. He remembers when she was going to be married; he remembers when she disappeared. He remembers when there was a synagogue instead of a butcher's shop, when it would not have been difficult to find the nine other adults necessary to form a minyan and perform an exorcism. She's speaking Yiddish. They are the last surviving Jews of their village and one of them is dead.
I assume it is obvious why I love this premise. It plays like a dream cross between a genderswapped Dybbuk and the sixteenth-century folktale retold by Howard Schwartz as "The Finger" and repurposed by Tim Burton for The Corpse Bride (2005)—both stories not only of romantic entanglement between the living and the dead, but of the insistence of the past on coming to light. The dead bride who clawed her way out of the earth with joking Reuven's ring on her skeletal finger died before her wedding and was forgotten so completely that no one even knew the riverbank contained her grave, but now she stands before the assembled guests at Reuven's wedding, insisting on her rights to the married life she was promised, the happiness she was denied. The dybbuk in An-sky's play both springs from and exposes a failure of memory—the convenient forgetting of wealthy Sender that he once made a vow with his beloved friend Nisn concerning the futures of their unborn children, so that now he can ignore the brilliant, penniless student with a strange affinity for his daughter in favor of a match more advantageous to his business. Demon's screenplay, co-authored by Wrona and Paweł Maślona, both broadens and sharpens this theme: in the shadow of the Holocaust, it is Jewish memory itself that is the persistent, inconvenient ghost. The war is only shallowly buried. It's darkly funny to watch Żaneta's parents scramble to contain the chaos of the reception with no help whatsoever from any of the spiritual or temporal institutions that are supposed to rise to the occasion of something like demonic possession: the Catholic priest (Cezary Kosiński) backs hastily away from the whole mess, practically disclaiming his faith in the process; the alcoholic doctor (Adam Woronowicz) philosophizes and psychoanalyzes to no one in particular and dissolves into mysticism as the night wears on; and the marginalized professor is too busy tenderly singing "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" to the dybbuk in the cellar to spare a thought for helping the neighbors save face. When Zygmunt and Zofia decide that the best course of action is to get all the guests blackout drunk and pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, that's funny, too, in an increasingly manic and disintegrating way. It is not so funny to see that their ideas of restoring order include physically dragging their weeping, protesting daughter away from her possessed husband and buttonholing the priest about an annulment, and it is not funny at all to realize that their willingness to make Piotr and his dybbuk disappear in a wave of vodka is merely the latest layer of the self-protective denial that has been going on in this town since the Germans blew up the bridge. Nothing bad is happening underneath this house, just as nothing bad happened here during the war. This land always belonged to Żaneta's grandfather. I guess there were maybe some Jews here once. Maybe? Not like it had anything to do with us if there were. Or weren't.
( In the old days it was simple. Everyone was Polish. )
"We must forget what we didn't see here," Zygmunt intones to his wrecked, exhausted guests at the end of the hellish night, a magician of negation carefully replacing the scales on his audience's eyes. "There never was a wedding . . . Neither is there a groom. And there never was." Some of the audience with which I saw Demon faulted it for ending without resolution, but that seemed to me almost the entire point of the film. There is no ending something that no one will acknowledge started in the first place. You cannot have an exorcism unless you first admit there is a ghost. You cannot heal a trauma if you deny there was ever a wound. The film's last shot shows the ferry pulling away around the river's bend, like a reverse of its initial entrance; on its deck stands a figure in a black leather jacket, her pale hair flagging in the wind. She is the script's one grace note of hope, a woman walking away from Omelas. Everything she leaves behind is trapped in a timelessness between atrocity and denial, a "whole country . . . built on corpses" resolutely refusing to look under its feet. Or it is in the past already, where history has already happened to it. There's nothing for that but memory.
It's a beautiful movie. The cinematography by Paweł Flis is full of near-tableaux that break up vividly and messily, everything so warmly shot that it feels—without being desaturated—like paging through an album of old photographs, with some of the same curious lacunae. There are no special effects that I could see. Hana is a hollow-eyed girl in an anachronistic dress, passing among the wedding guests in the theatrical understanding that she is invisible to everyone but the audience and the basherter who found her bones. Piotr's possession is conveyed as it would have been onstage—Tiran's contorting body, his husky falsetto voice coloring to its new language as if it had never spoken anything else. The most uncanny images in the production are the ones that feel like allegories with the key missing: a woman struggling from a man's arms into the river, the front loader moving as if self-willed, the juxtaposition of a funeral procession crossing paths with the wedding party the morning after. Altogether it possesses the quality I associate with the best fiction of the weird, the sense that everything should fit together in some kind of pattern, but nothing quite does. It's not dreamlike; it has too many sharp edges. I would call it unheimlich, except the supernatural element is the one that has the most right to call itself at home.1
The previous best dybbuk film made in any country was also Polish: Michał Waszyński's masterwork of Yiddish cinema The Dybbuk (דער דיבוק, 1937). Watching it, as with many other Yiddish-language movies made before World War II, is a double act of haunting: An-sky set his play in a world that was disappearing even as he documented it and the industry in which Waszyński worked—not to mention much of his intended audience—would be gone within a few years of filming. Marcin Wrona committed suicide in 2015, a few days after Demon's premiere. I don't know his reasons; neither did Antony Polonsky, who spoke briefly after the screening at the MFA. It was his third and last film. It is appropriate to hear a dead voice tell a dybbuk story, but I don't think it should be compulsory. Nonetheless, this one is worth listening to. It's a worthy successor to Waszyński's film and has set me listening to the Klezmatics' Possessed (1997) on repeat; more recently I was reminded of Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015), another movie like things I have read and dreamed of seeing for a long, long time. This unearthing brought to you by my mindful backers at Patreon.
1. The other main contributor to the uncanny feel of Demon is its out-of-focus specificity, by which I mean that some of its incidental details are very clear and some very important ones blur the closer you try to look at them. Piotr is one of the latter. His personality is forthright; his origins are not. Polish is not his first language, although he insists on speaking it with his prospective in-laws; they address him naturally in English and have to be reminded not to call him "Peter." He met Żaneta in London, but we don't know what he was doing there. The likeliest explanation is that he's the UK-born/raised child of Polish immigrants, but the fact that the film never offers evidence either way gives him an ambiguous, unsettled status, half outsider, half countryman. There is an almost subliminal question of whether he's Jewish: his actor is. After a while, the uncertainty of his identity extends even as far as time.
Loosely adapted from Piotr Rowicki's stage play Adherence/The Clinging (Przylgnięcie, 2008) and taking cues from Jewish folklore as well as An-sky's seminal play, Demon is, like every effective possession, more than one thing at once, encompassing a poignant ghost story, a romantic tragedy, a black comedy, and a scalding indictment of the failure of historical memory, specifically in the director's native Poland. Pay attention to the opening image—a front loader trundling through the misty, empty streets of an antique-looking town is an obvious symbol of excavation and construction, but it can be used just as easily for covering up and tearing down. One does not preclude the other. Building can be a form of erasure, depending on what's under the foundations. Everything in the film will be this ambivalent, its protagonist included.
The action begins with a ferry rounding the bend of a wide, flat river, a young man leaning on the rail. This is Piotr (Itay Tiran, giving a powerhouse performance), nicknamed "Python." He has a clever, slightly clownish, youthfully leonine face, something of a tough air in his black leather jacket and jeans and boots, his dark hair cropped tight. He drives a Range Rover. He could be anyone. He's an engineer from London, come to Poland to marry his girlfriend in her rural home town; he knows his way around the loader left on the grounds of the ramshackle farmhouse he and his bride-to-be are inheriting as a fixer-upper gift from her father. The day before the wedding, the place looks like a derelict memory palace, its rain-faded walls still hung with clouded mirrors and glass-cracked photographs, its doorways scratched with heights and ages that Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) assumes must have belonged to her grandfather's family, though she's puzzled not to recognize all the names. They are a modern, international couple—they did most of their falling in love over Skype—but the Catholic blowout of the wedding is more than just a concession to her parochial parents (Andrzej Grabowski and Katarzyna Gniewkowska) who'd rather have seen her marry a nice homegrown Polish boy; tradition seems important to them, too, the past, roots, family. Żaneta's enthusiasm as she shows him around the property causes Piotr to tease that she's "more in love with this place than she is with me." She kisses him passionately in rebuttal while her brother Jasny (Tomasz Schuchardt) wraps them both in an affectionate embrace, two fair-haired kinfolk welcoming the dark stranger into their midst. When he fires up the loader to break ground on an ambitiously proposed swimming pool, already as confident as a homeowner, they leave him to it. They shouldn't have: in the next scoop of earth are bones. They look human. A troubled Piotr immediately drives over to tell his imminent in-laws, but the wedding preparations are so busy and so joyful—and his position as the groom from away still so contingent—that he can't bring himself to interrupt. He keeps the secret to himself, going out after dark with a flashlight to look again for the gravesite. He sees rain, trees, a human figure moving beyond the windows of the old house, kneeling with its back to him or standing somehow to its knees in the dark wet field; he's lured by its vagueness, drawn off into his own rain-scattered circle of light when he comes suddenly face-to-face with a dark-haired girl in white (Maria Dębska). For a moment he sees her clearly—her pale face, her antique wedding dress, her mouth and eyes as heavily shadowed as theatrical makeup—and then the earth liquefies beneath his feet. Black, depthless, it swallows him up.
He flails awake in the back seat of his car with his groomsmen banging on the windows, laughing at him for almost oversleeping his own wedding. He's a little disoriented, a little groggy, but Jasny greeted him yesterday with a bottle in hand and today they're getting started on the booze well ahead of the wedding celebrations. Flanked by the glowering but obedient Ronaldo (Tomasz Zietek), Jasny gives a toast in farewell to his wild London friend and greeting of the husband who's going to make his sister happy: "Python has died and in his place is born Piotr." The groom dresses distractedly—staring at his own hands, starting at a string of small children who seem to run from and to nowhere—but for the ceremony itself he is clear, focused, committed, sliding the ring onto Żaneta's finger and lifting her joyously in a swirl of white-blond hair and whiter veil. Arriving early at the barn out back of the farmhouse where the reception is to take place, the newlyweds even sneak off into a bedroom to consummate their marriage in a giggly, adolescent moment of stolen privacy before the hours of revelry and congratulation to come. Everyone who is familiar with the Ashkenazi post-wedding ritual of the yichud, please start your wondering. It is at the reception, however, that things really begin to derange. Żaneta flings her glass over her shoulder after a traditional toast; Piotr stamps on his, sharp and gleeful as a dancer, then seems puzzled both by his own reflex action and the crowd's lack of appropriate response. Making his first toast as a married man, he stumbles over Żaneta's name, substitutes the unfamiliar "Hana" instead. He dizzies in the dancing, finds himself spinning in the arms of the same dark-haired girl from last night's vision, who by the electric glare of the barn's bulb-hung rafters looks even less alive than she did standing over her own grave. He stammers. He faints. As his body convulses and his voice whoops through registers, the frantic parents of the bride blame vodka, food poisoning, epilepsy, schizophrenia, God knows what freakish foreign ailment, finally bundle him out of sight into the basement to give themselves time to think how best to salvage this scandalous disaster. Half-naked, his breast beating like a bird's, Piotr struggles against his bonds, glossolaling an eerie nonsense—unless, like the elderly teacher Szymon Wentz (Włodzimierz Press) whose erudite, self-deprecating, pointedly disregarded toast told the audience everything they needed to know about his token status in this community, the listener has some knowledge of other languages common in Poland before 1939–45. Piotr's body language is trembling, defiant, protective of its modesty. His voice lightens in his throat, his words catch farther back in it. Even his gold chain lies differently around his neck. He says his name is Hana; he says she lives in this house. Where is her family? Isn't this her wedding? Piotr is the man she was promised, her basherter. Szymon blinks back tears, addresses another question to this familiar spirit in strange flesh in a language he hasn't shared with anyone in seventy years. He knew her when she was alive—"Little Szymon," she recalls him, the tagalong younger brother of a boy she ran with. He remembers when she was going to be married; he remembers when she disappeared. He remembers when there was a synagogue instead of a butcher's shop, when it would not have been difficult to find the nine other adults necessary to form a minyan and perform an exorcism. She's speaking Yiddish. They are the last surviving Jews of their village and one of them is dead.
I assume it is obvious why I love this premise. It plays like a dream cross between a genderswapped Dybbuk and the sixteenth-century folktale retold by Howard Schwartz as "The Finger" and repurposed by Tim Burton for The Corpse Bride (2005)—both stories not only of romantic entanglement between the living and the dead, but of the insistence of the past on coming to light. The dead bride who clawed her way out of the earth with joking Reuven's ring on her skeletal finger died before her wedding and was forgotten so completely that no one even knew the riverbank contained her grave, but now she stands before the assembled guests at Reuven's wedding, insisting on her rights to the married life she was promised, the happiness she was denied. The dybbuk in An-sky's play both springs from and exposes a failure of memory—the convenient forgetting of wealthy Sender that he once made a vow with his beloved friend Nisn concerning the futures of their unborn children, so that now he can ignore the brilliant, penniless student with a strange affinity for his daughter in favor of a match more advantageous to his business. Demon's screenplay, co-authored by Wrona and Paweł Maślona, both broadens and sharpens this theme: in the shadow of the Holocaust, it is Jewish memory itself that is the persistent, inconvenient ghost. The war is only shallowly buried. It's darkly funny to watch Żaneta's parents scramble to contain the chaos of the reception with no help whatsoever from any of the spiritual or temporal institutions that are supposed to rise to the occasion of something like demonic possession: the Catholic priest (Cezary Kosiński) backs hastily away from the whole mess, practically disclaiming his faith in the process; the alcoholic doctor (Adam Woronowicz) philosophizes and psychoanalyzes to no one in particular and dissolves into mysticism as the night wears on; and the marginalized professor is too busy tenderly singing "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" to the dybbuk in the cellar to spare a thought for helping the neighbors save face. When Zygmunt and Zofia decide that the best course of action is to get all the guests blackout drunk and pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, that's funny, too, in an increasingly manic and disintegrating way. It is not so funny to see that their ideas of restoring order include physically dragging their weeping, protesting daughter away from her possessed husband and buttonholing the priest about an annulment, and it is not funny at all to realize that their willingness to make Piotr and his dybbuk disappear in a wave of vodka is merely the latest layer of the self-protective denial that has been going on in this town since the Germans blew up the bridge. Nothing bad is happening underneath this house, just as nothing bad happened here during the war. This land always belonged to Żaneta's grandfather. I guess there were maybe some Jews here once. Maybe? Not like it had anything to do with us if there were. Or weren't.
( In the old days it was simple. Everyone was Polish. )
"We must forget what we didn't see here," Zygmunt intones to his wrecked, exhausted guests at the end of the hellish night, a magician of negation carefully replacing the scales on his audience's eyes. "There never was a wedding . . . Neither is there a groom. And there never was." Some of the audience with which I saw Demon faulted it for ending without resolution, but that seemed to me almost the entire point of the film. There is no ending something that no one will acknowledge started in the first place. You cannot have an exorcism unless you first admit there is a ghost. You cannot heal a trauma if you deny there was ever a wound. The film's last shot shows the ferry pulling away around the river's bend, like a reverse of its initial entrance; on its deck stands a figure in a black leather jacket, her pale hair flagging in the wind. She is the script's one grace note of hope, a woman walking away from Omelas. Everything she leaves behind is trapped in a timelessness between atrocity and denial, a "whole country . . . built on corpses" resolutely refusing to look under its feet. Or it is in the past already, where history has already happened to it. There's nothing for that but memory.
It's a beautiful movie. The cinematography by Paweł Flis is full of near-tableaux that break up vividly and messily, everything so warmly shot that it feels—without being desaturated—like paging through an album of old photographs, with some of the same curious lacunae. There are no special effects that I could see. Hana is a hollow-eyed girl in an anachronistic dress, passing among the wedding guests in the theatrical understanding that she is invisible to everyone but the audience and the basherter who found her bones. Piotr's possession is conveyed as it would have been onstage—Tiran's contorting body, his husky falsetto voice coloring to its new language as if it had never spoken anything else. The most uncanny images in the production are the ones that feel like allegories with the key missing: a woman struggling from a man's arms into the river, the front loader moving as if self-willed, the juxtaposition of a funeral procession crossing paths with the wedding party the morning after. Altogether it possesses the quality I associate with the best fiction of the weird, the sense that everything should fit together in some kind of pattern, but nothing quite does. It's not dreamlike; it has too many sharp edges. I would call it unheimlich, except the supernatural element is the one that has the most right to call itself at home.1
The previous best dybbuk film made in any country was also Polish: Michał Waszyński's masterwork of Yiddish cinema The Dybbuk (דער דיבוק, 1937). Watching it, as with many other Yiddish-language movies made before World War II, is a double act of haunting: An-sky set his play in a world that was disappearing even as he documented it and the industry in which Waszyński worked—not to mention much of his intended audience—would be gone within a few years of filming. Marcin Wrona committed suicide in 2015, a few days after Demon's premiere. I don't know his reasons; neither did Antony Polonsky, who spoke briefly after the screening at the MFA. It was his third and last film. It is appropriate to hear a dead voice tell a dybbuk story, but I don't think it should be compulsory. Nonetheless, this one is worth listening to. It's a worthy successor to Waszyński's film and has set me listening to the Klezmatics' Possessed (1997) on repeat; more recently I was reminded of Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015), another movie like things I have read and dreamed of seeing for a long, long time. This unearthing brought to you by my mindful backers at Patreon.
1. The other main contributor to the uncanny feel of Demon is its out-of-focus specificity, by which I mean that some of its incidental details are very clear and some very important ones blur the closer you try to look at them. Piotr is one of the latter. His personality is forthright; his origins are not. Polish is not his first language, although he insists on speaking it with his prospective in-laws; they address him naturally in English and have to be reminded not to call him "Peter." He met Żaneta in London, but we don't know what he was doing there. The likeliest explanation is that he's the UK-born/raised child of Polish immigrants, but the fact that the film never offers evidence either way gives him an ambiguous, unsettled status, half outsider, half countryman. There is an almost subliminal question of whether he's Jewish: his actor is. After a while, the uncertainty of his identity extends even as far as time.
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