Piotr (Itay Tiran) and Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) met over the web and are about to be married. He barely speaks Polish, having lived in England for several years. As he comes back to the country for their wedding, he moves into an old home that was owned by her grandfather. However, as he works in the yard, he unearths a skeleton and starts to have visions of a dead bride, Hana, who slowly possesses him during the reception.

As Żaneta is from a rich family, they want to hide this from their friends, so they ply them with food and drink as a doctor and a priest examine Piotr. Only a teacher (Wlodzimierz Press), who is the last surviving Jewish person in the town, recognizes that the possessed man is speaking Yiddish and has the voice of Hana.

Directed by Marcin Wrona, who wrote the story with Pawel Maslona which was based on Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence, Demon is a new way of looking at the Dybbuk myth but infused through marriage. In the act of being wed, we move past our previous selves and become someone new, someone united not only with a new person, but an entirely different family. Żaneta’s relatives may have profited from World War II and the extermination of the Jewish people, so their sins have come to infect the person who is joining them.

As the guests drunkenly become debauched and the winds and rain howl with fury outside, the groom is in the basement losing his sanity.

Sadly, Wrona committed suicide in his hotel room during the Gdynia Polish Film Festival where this movie was being shown. Beyond this tragic loss of life, this act ends the art that could have been created. What a loss.

Demon is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by Slavic horror scholar Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk, commentary with film historian Daniel Bird and film critic/actress Manuela Lazić, a video essay by Peter Bebergal, author Oo Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story Of The Technological Quest For The Supernatural and filmmaker Stephen Broomer, a trailer and the short film Dibbuk.

You can order this set from Severin.