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In the Flesh: Demon
🕑 Added 2021-04-28 19:35:30 +0000 UTC“This whole country is built on bones,” family patriarch Zygmunt (Andrzej Grabowski) chuckles nervously, waving a dismissive hand at his new son-in-law Piotr’s (Itay Tiran) insistence that there’s a skeleton buried on the grounds of the family’s pre-war property. While seldom discussed in frank terms by the film’s characters, the devastation of Poland’s Jewish community during and after the second world war forms the backdrop of Demon’s entire story. A well-to-do Polish couple holds their wedding at the bride’s family’s country estate, an expansive tract of land once owned by wealthy Jewish citizens and, it’s implied, snapped up on the cheap by the bride’s grandfather after its owners met their end at the hands of the Nazis. There are oblique suggestions that the grandfather had once wooed one of the family’s daughters, a famous beauty named Hana whose mournful phantasm (Maria Dębska) haunts the wedding proceedings and eventually possesses Piotr’s body, claiming it is “what was promised”.
The possession scene is one of the best in recent memory, Tiran thrashing and groaning with remarkable flexibility as his wedding guests look on in glazed, half-drunken horror. The family’s rush to cover it up is equally off-putting as they scramble to ply their guests with drink and go so far as to gag Piotr and lock him in the basement, another dirty secret to be buried like the skeleton under the lawn. The film's lone living Jewish character, referred to only as the teacher (Wlodzimierz Press), murmurs briefly while driving through the nearby town that once it was alive with Jewish families and businesses, a community of which he is the sole remaining survivor. No one seems very interested in his tale. Piotr himself has lived most of his life in London and knows little of Poland, speaking Polish with an awkward accent. When Hana possesses him, the history he comes from and marries into forcibly asserts itself over his body, caring nothing for his ignorance.
It is the film’s elliptical approach to its own central conflicts, more than its gorgeously decrepit rustic sets or the quiet, jaw-dropping beauty of its camera work, that sets it apart from similar horror in which past atrocities are sublimated in the figure of a specter. In this case the trespasser recalls the classic story of the dybbuk, the possessing spirit of a suitor tricked or cheated out of marriage with their beloved, which features prominently in Jewish folklore. The dybbuk is traditionally appeased when its lover joins it in death, but the Devil features no climactic expulsion of Hana’s spirit, no reckoning with the past. In the end the only answer Zygmunt and his family have to the problem of the ghost is another, deeper hole than the one her skeleton lies buried in.
Comments
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Alejandra, this is so incredibly kind of you. Thank you <3
I had to watch this movie immediately! You have no idea how grateful I am for the way your reviews and film selections have enriched my viewing experiences. I love having found you and the community around you that approaches art the way you all do, it’s such an inspiration.
