The story of a bridegroom possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration unfolds with horrifying results in the dark drama, Demon.
In this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk, Demon, depicts a soul murdered in the Holocaust that is bogged down in the blood-soaked soil of Poland and enters the body of the bridegroom.
Israeli actor Itay Tiran portrays a young British man who arrives in a remote Polish village to marry the Polish woman he loves. Shortly before the wedding, he discovers human bones in the earth, a disturbing remnant of Jewish life that had been severed a few decades earlier. The bones haunt him, entering his body and turning his merry, vodka-soaked wedding into a horror spectacle – albeit partly comical.
The dark nature of the material is further compounded by the fact that the film’s director, Marcin Wrona, committed suicide prior to the film’s debut.
During the making of the film, Wrona later admitted that the hard work and the emotionally charged subject matter inspired a “suicidal atmosphere.” He was invited as a guest of honor to the film’s debut in Israel last fall, at the Haifa Film Festival, but he never arrived. Ten days earlier, late one night, Wrona’s partner and one of the film’s producers found him hanging in the bathroom of a hotel room in Gdynia, where he had been a guest at a local film festival.
Demon opens in theaters on September 9, 2016.
Check out the trailer, below: