Despite not being a particularly gory effort, but rather a Polanski-esque film, Demon shows how much Polish cinema is incomplete due to its chronic lack of solid horror non-war-based productions

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2024

Anchored by Itay Tiran's tortured performance, Demon manages to reinvent everything you know about possession movies while also honoring everything you come to expect from the subgenre.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

an off-kilter and surreal expression of commitment's dark underbelly

| Jul 14, 2021

The thing that makes this film epic is not only is it done in a wedding... it's also got this music that is so intense, so epic, and just so cinematic.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 26, 2021

Much of Demon feels like a song of lament.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 6, 2020

Chilling, ominous mood balances well with comic relief, at least at first. After that, the two disparate elements clash in a manner difficult to reconcile, the film loses focus on underdeveloped threads, and it meanders to a shrug of an ending.

| Original Score: C | Jul 3, 2020

This version of such a story feels more like how some may imagine this would happen in real life and is an interesting take on the dybbuk.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 19, 2020

Demon uses mainstream cinematic devices to sneak a heady, atypical art-house horror flick past your defenses.

| Apr 15, 2020

Rather than emulate the tropes of a joyous wedding, Demon feels like a funeral party that has stretched on for three generations.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2019

An unsettling horror which conjures up ghosts of another epoch.

| Nov 8, 2018

Demon is an initially captivating film that ends with a whimper of an ambiguous ending that nearly ruined my enjoyment of everything that had come before it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2018

Instead of mounting a gross, brooding, or bloody tale of demonic possession, Wrona crafts a nuanced, slow burning look at cultural scars and shames that will never fully heal or be forgotten.

| Aug 28, 2018

Evokes the great Luis Bunuel with its skewering dark humor. In a land that's "built on corpses," this is where fairytales were born to go rotten.

| Aug 22, 2018

This is a portrait of Poland as a not-so-sweet little village, unable to move on from small-town xenophobia against Jews like Hana or modern outsiders like Piotr, even as its unresolved past returns, like a dybbuk, to reinhabit the present...

| May 29, 2018

The writing and direction of Demon are too sloppy - messy, even - to give 
a stable shape to materials as complex as those found in the film.

| Jan 10, 2018

A provocative mixture of horror movies. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 30, 2017

Marcin Wrona is attempting to make a serious movie within a genre framework, and he succeeds in balancing the right amounts of fear, humour, and grotesquerie.

| Sep 25, 2017

[Marcin] Wrona creates an increasingly eerie atmosphere, and a sense of menace so profound, it keeps us engrossed right up to the last frame.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 11, 2017

. . .Demon shares another common horror film problem -- it doesn't satisfactorily resolve the chaos it has indulged.

| Aug 29, 2017

Demon skips from climax to credits without much in the way of denouement. It feels abrupt, like treading on a step that isn't there.

| Aug 14, 2017