Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

47th Kill

What is the most under-exploited folkloric monster in horror movies? My vote goes to the dybbuk - kind of a Hebrew twist on the tired old Catholic trope of demonic possession where the soul of a dead person with malicious intent back in the land of the living basically attaches itself to an unwitting host.* Therein lies the clever wordplay of the title, as the very thing which causes the presence to re-emerge in this story is its victim's first serious relationship with a new lover - an attachment of a very negative kind reacting to an attachment of a positive kind.**

There's a pretty winning chemistry at play here in Gabriel Bier Gislason's debut feature - a melding of romantic comedy and supernatural spookfest where both elements work well while co-existing alongside one another. The romance between young British Jew Leah and the lonely, dissolute Maja - who comes to live with her in London after a whirlwind romance in Denmark - is beautifully evoked. The film's rather gentle comedic stylings are applied with a deft touch and are genuinely amusing. Meanwhile, when the supernatural threat starts to become apparent, there are some real spine chilling moments. It's all been wrangled into a very coherent and compelling narrative in an ingeniously economical way, the low budget never intruding on the slickness of the package.

The small cast is superb - Josephine Park as Maja makes a fully sympathetic protagonist; Sofie Gråbøl (most famous as Detective Sarah Lund in the classic Nordic noir series, The Killing) brings her trademark intensity to the role of Leah's severely tightly-wound mother; David Dencik is a revelation as a local Jewish occultist, totally stealing the show as far as comedic moments go; but the most impressive for me was Ellie Kendrick's wonderful physical performance as Leah. Between her acting, some lovely subtle make-up work and Gislason's astute direction, we get a complete physical tranformation as the dybbuk takes stronger hold on Leah, and some of these scenes were genuinely unnerving.

I do feel the film's only real flaw is its unwillingness to fully follow through on the horror. The slow build-up to Leah's transformation is so well done, I needed something more wickedly cathartic. I'm not saying it needed Evil Dead levels of blood and gore, but the film needed a more visceral impact in the final act to pay off all that suspense. The way things play out felt a little too wordy and flat - not to mention slightly confusing as the lore of the situation that we are explicitly led to understand seems to be somehow not followed in the final couple of scenes. Gislason does wisely allow himself some leeway by having the occultist frankly admit that he doesn't fully know what he's doing or how exactly to defeat this evil, but it did just leave my scratching my head a bit.

Overall though, I think this is a pretty impressive little flick - will definitely be worth your time if you subscribe to Shudder because I think that's where it's headed after its festival run. This was the extent of my own sampling of the London Film Festival this year but then again, this is the first time I've ever gone, thanks to the esteemed encouragement of Eduardo C. WraithApe (it's pronounced "Vrye-tah-pee" - it's Polish or something, I think) so thank you sir for the invitation!

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Yeah, see, this is the only drawback. We do get a direct victim to the dybbuk's brutal malevolence but it happens off screen and the only pay off is to see this character's bloody hand protruding from behind a curtain later on - far too restrained and subtle for my liking, even for a predominantly psychological horror like this one.

*For an excellent dybbuk movie, I highly recommend the Polish film Demon by Marcin Wrona, sadly his last feature before his tragic suicide

**The Danish title translates as "The Night Has Eyes" (at least according to my smart alec friend Google, it does) which strikes me as cool sounding but not as good as "Attachment"