[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

Since the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukrainian representation at film festivals has been –understandably – dominated by harrowing accounts of the war. In Demons, her second feature after 2020’s Bad Roads, playwright and filmmaker Natalya Vorozhbit offers a different kind of work. This offbeat romantic fantasy is concerned not so much with depicting the current situation as allegorizing the origins of the decades-long strife between the two nations.

In the winter of 1993, radios in Ukraine are buzzing with news about a nuclear disarmament plan – the decisive first steps of a newborn nation. In a sleepy village indifferent to these upheavals, a bookish Russian writer named Slavik (Aleksei Mitin) declares his love for Nina, an older widow. She reciprocates, and soon he moves in with her, much to the dismay of her grown-up children. But when spring arrives, he leaves Nina for a string of younger women, plunging her into jealousy and despair. Nina, however, readily accepts Slavik when he eventually returns – only for him to abuse and abandon her again.

Adapted from Vorozhbit’s 2004 play of the same name, Demons is also a portrait of an oddball village full of busybodies, lonely hearts and real-estate sharks. Nina is one among this community of cartoonish eccentrics, but, as remarkably played by the late actress and beloved television host Ruslana Pisanka, who channels a mix of hurt and stoicism, she acquires undeniable depth.

Slavik and Nina’s twisted love story – possessing a symbolic political dimension – has the corrosive, almost suffocating quality of a Fassbinder melodrama, but Vorozhbit infuses the material with a generous dose of magic, folklore and bawdy humour. With cinematographer Volodymyr Ivanov, she builds her world in saturated, painterly tones and deep shadows. The dense mise en scène, marked by an emphatic use of décor, and the labyrinthine camerawork together produce the impression of a warped universe with its own, arcane rules.

Ironically, Demons’ own making was impacted by the war. The Russian invasion took place with just four days of the shoot left, forcing the cast and crew to disperse, while Vorozhbit found herself in a bomb shelter the very next day. Pisanka, who had broken her leg three times during the shoot, had to flee Ukraine in a wheelchair. Though she found refuge in Germany, she died a few months later from severe illness, aged just 56. At last premiering four years after its production, Demons is an homage to this cherished figure of Ukrainian media.