Demon

• The screenplay, by Marcin Wrona and Pawel Maslona, adapts Piotr Rowicki's stage play 'Adherence' (Polish 'Przylgniecie', sometimes rendered 'Clinging'), reworking the Jewish dybbuk legend so the possessing spirit is a specific Holocaust-era victim whose bones surface as the wedding party clears the bride's family land.
• Lead actor Itay Tiran is a major Israeli stage and screen name who broke out in Samuel Maoz's war film 'Lebanon' (2009). For 'Demon' he performs almost entirely in Polish, a language he does not speak, alongside the film's English and Yiddish dialogue, playing an emigre groom returning to Poland for the wedding.
• It was Wrona's final film. He died by suicide on 19 September 2015 in a hotel room in Gdynia, Poland, while the picture was screening at the Gdynia Film Festival; he was 42. A Polish autopsy ruled the death a likely suicide.
• The film was a Polish-Israeli co-production shot in Poland, produced by Olga Szymanska, who was Wrona's newlywed wife. Wrona himself attended the Toronto world premiere on 11 September 2015, just eight days before his death; Szymanska went on to tour with the film as his widow.
• It premiered in the Vanguard section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and holds a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating across 66 reviews and an 80 Metacritic score, though Variety's Joe Leydon praised the dread and gallows humor while slamming the third act.
• Wrona built his career on shorts before features; his diploma film 'Magnet Man' ('Czlowiek magnes', 2001) won the Best Student Film prize at the 2002 Tribeca Film Festival.

The dybbuk isn't a monster, it's an accusation. Hana was a Jewish woman erased from this town, and her bones surface on land a Polish family now owns and is about to celebrate on. The possession forces the wedding party to physically host the person their community disappeared. The horror is the town's response: not fear, but the machinery of forgetting.

The father-in-law Zygmunt's closing speech is the real climax. He tells the guests there was no groom, no wedding, nothing happened, and they agree to drink it away. Read the whole film as an allegory for Polish Holocaust amnesia, the bulldozing of the old house at dawn isn't cleanup, it's the same erasure that buried Hana the first time, repeated in real time.

Piotr never really exists as his own man. He arrives a stranger marrying into property, gets emptied out and refilled by the land's buried memory, then is written out of the record entirely by morning. The film treats him less as a victim than as a vessel the past borrows to speak, which is why his disappearance unsettles everyone less than the wedding's collapse does.

A Polish-British emigre named Piotr flies in to marry Zaneta at her family's crumbling country house in rural Poland. Clearing the overgrown grounds before the wedding, his excavator turns up human bones. By the time the vodka is flowing, something has climbed inside him. As the reception drags toward dawn, Piotr convulses, speaks in a dead woman's voice, and starts asking after a Jewish bride named Hana who vanished from this town generations ago. The family's solution isn't an exorcism. It's denial, drink, and a bulldozer.