Demon

Starts slowly and ominously and gradually accelerates into a frenzy.

Whatever Demon’s autobiographical elements, this film feels incredibly personal; like a howl of pain ripped straight out of someone’s soul.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

Demon is a powerful film, one that makes us wonder what greater films Wrona might have made.

At once a shocking, baroque freak-out and a finely tuned, brilliantly paced surrealist black comedy.

Demon is a film that improves the longer it sits with you, as various images seep into your consciousness and reappear without warning.

A so-so meditation on historical amnesia. It’s also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.

Demon is a decent enough horror flick that starts quite strong and has wonderful visuals. Unfortunately the film starts to unravel in the 3rd act and we are left with so-so ambiguity.

Strong performances drive a story forward that can be engaging at times. You get hints of the emotions but overall it tends to drag and never really delivers any powerful feelings one way or the other.

The film is an expose on historic relations between non-Jewish and Jewish Poles, the theme being ‘ignorance is bliss’. However, if you are going into the film blind that will not be apparent. Without context, it’s pretty boring. Not too many scares.

This was a very disappointing movie. There was some very good acting, but this film lacked a coherent narrative. Numerous times characters behaved completely irrationally, frequently by totally failing to react. Presumably cutting from a scene in the middle of the night to a scene in morning sunshine and then back to a scene at night is metaphorical for something, or symbolic of something. All it achieved for me is make me very irritated because not one of the characters involved seemed put out by this wedding lasting, apparently, three days, with no sleep. Again, maybe that's symbolic, but it just irritated me. I don't want to watch a movie where the narrative is second priority to the meta-narrative. A meta-narrative should complement the narrative, and each should be able to stand on its own merits. This is a pretentious flop. A film should not have so very many scenes where a character stands in front of a stationary camera and gets to portray - what? A drunken bridesmaid singing badly in a state of undress? What does that add to the plot, and since we don't even know her name or her relationship to anything whatsoever, what does it add to anything? There are several such scenes, they all go on too long and cause the performance of the actor to be so transparently performative that any immersion in the story is ripped away. A lot of this movie went over my head. So I don't like it. But you know what makes a really terrific film; it works on every level. This movie does not work on the most basic levels of story-telling. As such, it strikes me as damning of the film-critics of America that they enjoyed this self-indulgent dreck so much. There was a historical theological debate over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. That's not apocryphal. But no matter how sophisticated the reasoning, or elegant the logic and arguments were, you'd really have to have your head way up your ass to call that a worthwhile contribution to the canon of Western philosophy.