The Devil

Żuławski throws you headfirst into a grotesque carnival of madness where morality, faith, and sanity collapse into hysteria. The Devil/The Stranger isn’t just that character slipping in and out of scenes like he already owns Jakub’s soul—he’s the whisper on your shoulder telling you to betray your compass, to say “fuck your morals, give in and act out evil”. He feeds on every act of violence as Jakub spirals further into a Faustian psychosis. Murder becomes less about survival and more like a ritual descent, each act another step into corruption. The nun feels like the only fragment of innocence, but even she is stripped bare in what plays like a ritual desecration, dragged into the same world of sin. When she kills the Devil, the question lingers—if killing is wrong, why does it feel righteous? When does morality stop holding? Żuławski never answers, and that silence leaves the film gnawing at you long after. The score is nothing short of intoxicating—haunting, violent, addictive. I might even play it on my daily commutes. It coils around every image until the hysteria feels symphonic. The whole film plays out like an interpretive dance of madness, grotesquerie, and beauty all at once, a parade where distortion becomes the natural order. Even the sudden appearances of little people, the warped theatrics, the eruptions of hysteria, all add to the sense that reality itself is buckling under corruption. The narrative is fragmented, jagged, chaotic, but that chaos is its perfection. It doesn’t guide or reassure—it fractures and convulses, delirium built into its structure. Żuławski commits so fully to the nightmare that the (purposeful) flaws become its strength. His actors are dragged into terrifying depths of despair, thrashing and screaming with a lunacy that feels like collapse rather than performance. I’ve only seen Possession and this, but it’s already clear that Żuławski pushes his actors to extremes most directors wouldn’t dare, pulling performances of such hysteria and despair that they deserve recognition on their own. Few filmmakers can conjure lunacy with this much raw power. For me, The Devil is flawless. A psychological nightmare, a grotesque theatre of faith and corruption, a fever that doesn’t just depict madness but becomes it. Żuławski proves himself insane in the most brilliant way, and he might just be joining my list of favourite directors alongside Lynch, Jodorowsky, and Kubrick.