Four young couples arrive on a secluded, snowy island, each with different relationship issues they hope to resolve, and one with a secret ulterior agenda. Ethnographer Stacy (Angelina Pakhomova, Mama) and her boyfriend Michael (Anton Rival, Medea) have been drifting apart; film critic Nick (Pierre Bourel, Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie) is jealous of the attention his girlfriend Kate (Paulina Vrublevskaya, III: The Ritual) receives from other men; polyamorous couple Javier (Arthur Beschastny, Whisper of the Witch) and Gin (Nino Ninidze, Lyubovniki) don’t seem to have the same goals; and finally there’s Olivia (Polina Davydova, The Master and Margarita) and Andy (Anton Rival) who have also hit a rough spot.

As the couples step off their helicopters, they are greeted by mysterious hosts wearing bird masks, and are informed that they will undergo five challenges over the course of their three-day retreat, to test them and help them fix their broken relationships. However, the guests soon find themselves drugged, waking up lost and confused in a creepy, labyrinth in the woods. They start seeing strange things and inexplicable occurrences, and hallucinate sexual encounters with some of the other guests. As their deepest fears and darkest desires start to surface, they discover that there is an ancient evil spirit on the island feeding on these repressed feelings. Meanwhile, Stacy’s real motive for coming to the island starts to become clear, and she may be the only hope for stopping this malevolent entity.

I don’t generally waste time writing up bad reviews, but since I already took 90 minutes to watch this film, I’ll spend a few more minutes on it. In short, this is not a film worth watching. First I’ll start with the acting. While the physical performances aren’t bad, the film just feels off. It sounds very poorly dubbed with flat, uninspired vocal performances. The odd thing is that it doesn’t look dubbed—the mouths appear to be saying the English dialogue, with no trace of an accent, despite the fact that the entire cast is Russian. It feels like the filmmakers must have utilized AI to make the lips move to the English dialogue. In this case, it would probably have been better to have the option of the original Russian audio with subtitles.

The pacing of the film was also off, moving very slowly at times, without much of a storyline. It felt more like a string of loosely-connected jump scares, sex scenes, and other random shocking images/creatures. It isn’t until the final 30 minutes of the film that we actually find out what is going on, and see this titular succubus, and even most of that is done via an exposition dump as we hear narration from a journal. The title of the film was oddly changed to The Demoness from its original Succubus, which was already being used by another more mainstream recent release, but the succubus in the film is always referred to as a “he”, so the new title doesn’t really fit. Finally, I found it very difficult to keep track of the various characters and who was in a relationship with who, especially when the hosts try to mix things up to test the guests. I suspect the filmmakers knew this was going to be an issue, since the characters are constantly referring to one another by name every time they cross paths.

I watched this film via a watermarked screener, so I don’t know how the audio/video presentation will compare to the retail release. But the picture generally looked very good even in the darker scenes, and the audio was quite immersive—as long as you can get by the very dubbed-sounding dialogue. Overall, I found the film to be a disappoint and not worth my time. It earns a rare Skip It from me.

What’s Included:

Digital specs may vary by platform/retailer.

Film: (1:36:04)

• 1080p / Widescreen 2.35:1
• Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1
• Subtitles: English, French

Extras:

No bonus material included.

Final Thoughts:

While I usually enjoy Well Go’s Asian foreign films, this Russian import, The Demoness, didn’t work for me. It felt less like a coherent horror film, and more like something you’d see on late night cable. It was slow, and the seemingly-dubbed English dialogue sounded terrible (coming from someone who often prefers to watch foreign films with the English Dub track selected). If I hadn’t been watching the film for review, I likely would have just turned it off early on. I would suggest passing on this one. But for the curious, the film debuts on Digital February 11, and arrives on Blu-ray & DVD exclusively through Amazon on May 27.