Demon

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

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

Entertaining and deeply screwed up with historic horrors, this is an all-too-human ghost story that wears several bleeding hearts on its sleeve.

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

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

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.

We've seen weddings explored as a chaotic setting in cinema numerous times before, but there's something uniquely compelling and wholly original about what Wrona creates with Demon.

Demon isn't a bad film; it's a disappointing one.

A fistfight between the bridegroom and one of his guests is the least bad thing that happens at the wedding of Piotr (Itay Tiran) and Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska).

Ultimately, what lingers most strongly in Wrona's impressive film is less the actual aberration, and more the examination of how people as a group react to it being in their midst.

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