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

A paranormal descent into madness and mayhem that's hauntingly good.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 21, 2016

Though it's based on Piotr Rowicki's play Clinging, director Marcin Wrona's spirited staging keeps it from ever dissolving into canned theater.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2016

Not only an instant genre classic but also an astute and affecting rumination on the notion that the shades of the past are always with us and can disrupt us to the point of personal and societal collapse.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2016

For a tale of repressed guilt, Demon sparkles with humor, reveling in the macabre.

| Sep 26, 2016

"Demon" is a testament to a still-budding talent, and it would have been fascinating to see where he went next.

| Original Score: B | Sep 23, 2016

A chilling, eerie cautionary tale about the ghosts that continue to haunt Poland long after the war.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2016

Wrona jumbles several genres together, including dark comedy, to illuminate larger, more ambitious themes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2016

Tonally the film recalls Andrzej Żuławski's shrieking psychodrama Possession, though the key to that movie was its inexplicability and Wrona's movie, with its conventional horror backstory, is much less perplexing.

| Sep 15, 2016

The exquisitely shot "Demon" is not gory or particularly scary, but it has its fair share of chills.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 14, 2016

Demon, Wrona's third and last feature, a Polish-Israeli co-production, is a supernatural film, as well as a family of melodrama and extremely dark comedy.

| Sep 14, 2016

Wrona keeps everything creepily ambiguous right up to the end, when the foggy dawn breaks and what we have witnessed becomes like a dream within a dream.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 9, 2016

Demon ranks up there with The Witch and The Babadook as one of the best recent horror films.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 9, 2016

It's comedy, as much as the eerie atmosphere and Tiran's very physical performance, that distinguishes Demon from routine ghost stories.

| Sep 8, 2016

Perhaps it's best to appreciate "Demon" not for what it implies but for what it simply and unmistakably is: A bravura testament to a talent silenced far too soon.

| Sep 8, 2016

It's also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.

| Original Score: C | Sep 8, 2016

More interesting than the horror imagery is the film's painfully somber message-no matter how far we try to run, the sins of history surround us always.

| Original Score: B | Sep 8, 2016

Nailing a tricky sense of physical anarchy (as well as some far subtler domestic tensions), Marcin Wrona's Polish import is an eerie, extraordinarily poised piece of horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2016

The film has a powerful undercurrent suggesting the feverish workings of a troubled yet brilliant mind.

| Aug 31, 2016

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

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 29, 2016