Metacritic reviews

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

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

Wrona’s near-flawless execution serves up a terror that’s enlightening and paralyzing all the same.

Demon becomes a siren to never forget the past or the many bodies left on battlefields of horrific wars. No matter how civilized or at peace we are now, history will always haunt us.

It must be noted that Wrona, a director of uncommon promise, committed suicide at a festival where this film was playing. It’s impossible to know his private pain, but it seems like he got a lot of it up onscreen.

Demon is a film that improves the longer it sits with you, as various images seep into your consciousness and reappear without warning.

It’s the kind of film that, rather like its mournful title apparition, clings to your sleeve and follows you home.

Things head eventually in an abstract direction that may have played better onstage than it does here ("we must forget what we didn't see here," guests are eventually instructed), but a compelling atmosphere lingers.

Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.

A so-so meditation on historical amnesia. It’s also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.