SCREAMFEST 2025: INTERNATIONAL—DEAD BY DAWN (2025)

Dead By Dawn (Martwi przed świtem, 2025)—Hailing from Poland, Dawid Torrone’s Dead By Dawn had its world premiere at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, where the question was posed: “Who’d have thought the true heir to the Italian giallo maestri Argento, Bava, Martino and Lenzi would hail from … Poland?” Such praise is misguidedly premature since it takes more than being the first giallo filmed in Poland (wryly referred to by the film’s creators as a giallo pollo) to deserve such presumptuous praise. Better to take the film on its own merits without saddling it with more than it’s achieved (it’s easier to enjoy it that way). After subsequent screenings at SxSW London, and Poland’s own Octopus Festival, Dead By Dawn has landed stateside for its North American premiere at Screamfest. 

For what appears to be his first full-length feature (IMDb only lists three episodes of a Polish television anthology series Let Me Tell You About the Crime under his belt), Torrone has had fun with his budget, draping his set with Christmas lights to hint at a holiday atmosphere, and to rhyme with Michal Pukowiec’s luridly-lit cinematography, oversaturated with deep reds and blues (a recognizable reference to Argento). You know how sometimes you turn off all the lights in a room just to watch a colorfully-lit Christmas tree? That contrast between darkness and primary color seems to be Pukowiec’s optical strategy here, and it’s effectively destablizing. 

So, after setting up the film with an execution performed on the stage of a baroque—and now-established—cursed theater owned by the Heissenhoff family (reputedly associated with occult practices), the story shifts to a stormy Christmas Eve when a troupe of young actors and actresses have been summoned by the renowned but reclusive playwright Heissenhoff to his family’s theater to rehearse his next play, which—unbeknownst to them—is intent upon turning the beloved nativity scene on its head. Not only have they been personally selected for their sacrilegious views and/or bad habits, but the script itself is laced with black magic incantations (let alone hallucinogens), and their rehearsals provide the ritual space for necessary sacrifices to effect the playwright’s satanic ends. Structuring his film in chapters provides sequentiality to the rituals, one building upon the other, blood upon blood, towards the film’s unholy climax. 

Pukowiec’s frenetic hand-held camera work not only observes all this ritual activity but—now and again, true to giallo conventions—takes on the point of the view of the murderer who stalks and kills the members of the acting troupe one by one. Like the film’s truly seductive theatrical poster (five stars!!), the murderer wears a fiercely memorable head mask composed of staring eyeballs. I’m presuming credit should go to production designer Agata Lepacka for this iconic costuming flourish, which links in well with the film’s best kill: the eyeball trauma of the “nail” sacrifice. My attitude towards independent genre films has always been that if they get even one scream or one major ICK out of me, they deserve a tip of the hat and the “nail” sacrifice deserves a resounding yelp for set-up, execution and prolongation. I was squirming in my seat!  

Though I have to agree with previous reviewers that Dead By Dawn lacks a desired restraint that would have communicated its narrative better—there’s a whole lot of overly-enthusiastic running and screaming and scantily-clad women and barechested boys and throbbling lights and indeterminate musical choices and everything but the kitchen sink—still, I can’t deny Torrone’s evident potential to envision such mayhem in truly artistic ways, primarily through the film’s choreography, most notably Monika Frajczyk’s hypnotic, erotic, and drug-fueled dance sequence filmed in reverse that elicits impending dread and supernatural compulsion. On the basis of his experiments with Dead By Dawn, I look forward to seeing what Torrone accomplishes next.