It’s not a new question, but what exactly makes something a horror film? Does it need a supernatural monster? Do there have to be jump scares? Does it need to show us horror, make us feel horror, both, neither? Does it need to actually be scary, or if it rather has the feeling of a mournful, anxious, mad dream, can it make the cut? I tend to cast a wide net, and while there are some thrillers, for example, that I’m not particularly keen on looking at through a horror lens, who am I to object if someone else wants to do so?
Today’s film is one that I’ve been impressed by for years and which is I think sadly underseen. One could argue quite fairly that it isn’t a horror film at all, but I would disagree. If anything, I think it has perhaps suffered from people coming to it expecting a certain kind of spooky possession flick (perhaps its name doesn’t help in this regard) and instead finding an art house drama, but I think the horror is there. A horror of remembrance, of terrible guilt uncovered – of what exactly – it may not actually specify, but the degree to which pains have been taken to cover things up, to consciously forget an irreparable pain and loss, and make a life atop the bones is surely the stuff of horror. It may not scare, but it surely haunts.
Demon (2015)
Like a mix of Wyspiański’s Wesele and Ansky’s Dybbuk, with a dash of the Jedwabne Pogrom on top, Marcin Wrona’s final film (he sadly committed suicide while promoting it) is a delirious, surreal, lingering meditation on the sins of the fathers, on the weight of past wounds that can’t be healed, on the drive to forget and the need to cling to what has passed and cannot return. A young man, Peter/Piotr comes to a village in Poland from London to marry his girlfriend Żaneta and fix up the old house she has inherited from her grandfather. The night before the wedding, working on the property, he uncovers a human skeleton, thus stirring up a painful mystery of the past – whose home had this been before and what happened to them? How exactly did Żaneta’s grandfather come to possess this land? What isn’t being talked about?
The next day, Piotr is behaving very strangely – throughout the ceremony and the party that follows, he keeps seeing a dark haired, possibly dead, young woman whom he calls “Hana” (having seen the name written on a doorframe in the grandfather’s house, tracking a child’s growth). He has fits which are diagnosed as epilepsy, tries to get information out of Żaneta’s father who rebuffs him, and inquires with the priest about seeing the spirits of the dead. Finally, in a climactic seizure, he is possessed by the ghost of Hana, a young Jewish girl who had lived in the house long ago. Żaneta’s father does everything within his power to keep a veneer of normalcy on the proceedings and save face within his community, but when Piotr/Hana disappears and cannot be found, all descends into drunken chaos and the next morning brings a sense of broken devastation. Piotr’s car (its driver having never resurfaced) is deposited in the water of the quarry that Żaneta’s father operates, the house is demolished, and all is forgotten once more.
The sparseness of the story is a strength here. There is very little to the plot and yet, a sense of mystery prevails, adding to the emotionally conflicted atmosphere of the whole. While we generally follow Piotr throughout, we are not privy to his inner life, and when his behavior shifts, we are initially unsure of exactly why. Similarly, the world of the film is somewhat inscrutable. In its opening, as Piotr is taking a ferry to his destination, he sees a woman in her nightgown screaming inconsolably and trying to walk into the water, her arms restrained by others who try to pull her back on shore. Who is she? Why is she screaming? Is this another possession? Is it just the presence of grief? We don’t know, but it sets a tone for what follows.
But it isn’t only gloom and sadness at this wedding. There is also a strong element of the absurd, of a desperate mania suffusing the event. From the start, in the behavior of the guests, in the music, in the rituals of the wedding party, there is a folksiness that is, in the beginning, simply fun and lively, and oh so specific. This is not a general presentation of ‘wild party,’ but the idiosyncrasies of both culture and character give it all a real life which is both appealing and intimidating – Piotr is a complete outsider. He knows his bride and her brother (with whom he worked in London) and no one else, and under the best of circumstances, it could be daunting to come into this kind of insular, intense community, where he doesn’t quite speak the language (though as a foreigner living in Poland, I think he does very well, and I wonder what we are supposed to surmise of his family background).
And everyone in it is so well drawn, so present and physical and earthy – sometimes ridiculous, sometimes threatening – from the new father-in-law who does not approve of this too short courtship (and moves to immediately have the marriage annulled once, now possessed, Piotr is deemed defective), to the doctor who makes such a big deal of being sober, but is the town’s biggest drunk, with the heart of a morose poet, to the friend of Żaneta’s brother, who seems dangerously into her and has it in for Piotr immediately (it’s even possible that he kills him, but nothing is certain), to “the professor,” an old, Jewish school teacher, doddering in his age, but also carrying a gentle sadness, the only remaining Jewish person in this town, which is implied to have had a thriving Jewish community before the war.
As the evening develops, and Hana’s emotional and spiritual grip on Piotr takes hold, the winds rise, rain pours down, the vodka flows like a river, and the revelry of the whole mad town of guests builds to a fever pitch. Generally, many of them don’t even seem that interested in the wedding itself, and the fact that the groom is practically frothing at the mouth is only a temporary oddity—they are caught in their own tempest, their inebriation echoing the storm outside in a feedback loop of pathetic fallacy, echoing a drive to live now, forget the past, and deny tomorrow. It is animalistic and corporeal, edging past what might conceivably be deemed ‘fun.’ When the sun rises, after all is done, they stumble across the fields of the village, at one point crossing paths with (even literally bumping into) a funeral party, the solemnity of the latter in such stark contrast to the absent respect of the former. And isn’t the lack of respect for what has come before, for the dead, at the heart of the ghost story?
The films follows a rather odd trajectory, the second act building in emotional intensity as first Piotr loses himself, and then Hana, speaking through him, is confronted with the disappearance of all that she ever knew. And then suddenly, they are gone. Really and truly – we never see either of them again. Everything unravels, but not in the hot explosion the previous rising action would have suggested, but rather the listless, slurring, drunken blackout that everyone has coming. Some go searching for Piotr/Hana, and at night, the streets are filled with fog, illuminated by searchlights, and it is beautiful and sad. The professor reminisces aloud about all that is gone, the world and community of his youth. These ghosts now walk the streets-we don’t see them, but the presence of absence is felt. The following morning, Żaneta’s father implores the guests that “we must forget what we never saw” – that there was no wedding – (there literally is no groom, after all), they were never there, he was never there. This is all just a dream that all will soon wake from and then everything will be clear. The accusing bones are once again covered with dirt; the world now is the only world that is and there is no reason to ever question how it came to be that way.
This is an interesting spin on the idea of the haunting. In an American context, we have endless tales of “Indian Burial Grounds,” of the original genocidal sin of America, the blood staining the land and dooming endless generations of nice enough, middle class white people to unpleasant interactions with newly acquired real estate which they never could have afforded if not for the stink lingering from past crimes and which they now can’t afford to leave, no matter how the walls may bleed or the flies may buzz. In the European context, history is long, and regardless of where you step, you will find yourself on land that was, at some point, stolen bloodily from someone else. And yet, relatively recent history (WWII, the Holocaust, etc.) looms especially large, certainly in Poland, a country which felt the effects of this history as few places did. Trauma still inhabits the land, and even if those holding property now did nothing unethical to acquire it (though some did – without casting any aspersions on the whole, some individuals will always be selfish and cruel), the murders of former owners linger, haunt. And at the same time, there is a vibrant, modern life going on, which needs to thrive and can’t exist constantly beholden to the past, to sadness.
I think Demon dwells in these contradictions, in this tension between the forgetting which is necessary to live and laugh and move forward and the memory which is a vital responsibility, often shirked. It is not a scary movie, but I would consider it horror. More significantly, it’s a stunning little picture, and it’s a shame that Wrona will never make another.
