A world outside with no interest in the human ego: Reflections on Patrik Syversen’s Demring
Gabrielė Liepa (b. 1993) is a film & literature graduate from Amsterdam University College. Their interest focuses on arthouse, queer and/or Eastern European films. They are currently studying creative film production in Berlin.
Demring screened at Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF), in the Critic’s Week section.
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TIFF 2026: The newest offering by Patrik Syversen, Dawning (Demring, 2025), had its world premiere in Fantastic Fest’s main competition and continues to make ripples in the international genre film festival waters. Even so, you’d be mistaken to anticipate an uncomplicated horror flick. Demring not only chops away at cinematic conventions; it just might be taking a stab at self-portraiture, currently so popular in Scandinavian cinema.
Three sisters Kristine (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), Cecilie (Silje Storstein) and Esther (Marte Magnusdotter Solem), together with Esther’s partner Even (Sigurd Myhre), reunite at the family summer cabin. Despite earnest intentions to help Kristine convalesce after a suicide attempt, the sisters seem to do nothing else but constantly nag and bicker with each other.
Early on in the film, while Kristine stubbornly, bunglingly tries to split a single log of wood, Cecilie and Esther have a weightier argument indoors. Having received the doleful news of the family matriarch passing away, Esther hesitates to inform Kristine, whom she pronounces to be too frail to handle it, or perhaps whom she cannot be bothered to handle. With echoes of the iconically grim scene in Citizen Kane (1941), in which Kane’s mother sternly gives away the child’s guardianship while he unsuspectingly plays in the snow, within the first act Demring already lays out some hefty struggles between autonomy and authority within the family system.
Interpersonal tensions between the sisters are revealed that raise a plethora of intriguing questions: patronisation in familial bonding, ethics of transparency and its lack, dubiety of potentially self-serving altruism… All the while, under the outspoken and the articulated looms the unsettling, totally unperturbed response to the death itself. Esther nonchalantly dismisses Even’s consolations –—the news has simply been long expected –—which must hide deeply-buried wounds of their own.
The natural assumption that this is the cataclysmic event to direct the rest of the film is, however, misled. While the elder siblings argue, Kristine spots a man (Thorbjørn Harr) brazenly observing her from the edge of the woods. He vanishes out of sight as instantaneously as he’d appeared. Demring reminds us in quite a brief, casual manner that horrible family dynamics are not quite enough to make a horror.
Ingmar Bergman looms tall over the setting, which ostensibly promises to be a Cries and Whispers (1972) variation for Norwegian millennials. Parts of the film that explore sororal claustrophobia do offer that; nonetheless, Demring plays with tonal, chronal and, possibly, dimensional shifts, disallowing us full immersion in the interpersonal drama.
«Talking heads» interviews with the sisters, in which they recount childhood neglect by their mother only add to the spectator’s detachment. So do the sparse musings of an omniscient, detached narrator, whose indifference to the fate of the characters and to his duties to keep the mystery alive flourishes the film with a tinge of satire.
By weaving discordant elements of chamber drama and cosmic horror, Demring creates a mélange that falls short of a smooth fusion. Such an ambition could not be reasonable anyway, and the strength and freshness of Demring is that it dares play with parts that clash. In the resulting disjointedness, those parts end up not overriding each other, but commenting on each other.
Allow me to make my case. Kristine’s struggles with mental health unambiguously take the centrestage. In the beginning, she quite childishly and insistently broadcasts this precedence to her sisters through disproportionate, aggressive outbursts accompanied by demonstrations of bandaged wrists. After Lukas (Harr) — the stranger by the woods — reappears, asking for help with his broken tractor, the film turns its attention away from family drama.
Still, Kristine’s protagonism is stubborn, and continues to intrude upon the urgency of what has now become a horror film by throwing the spectators into her melancholic and quite superbly aesthetic memories. The egotism of a protagonist (especially a depressed one) cannot but struggle with arbitrary forces of the universe in a futile attempt to regain control over both narrative and narration.
The straightforward physical brutality of a horror mocks the nuances and microaggressions of psychological drama, which is not to say that Demring is dismissive of psychic pain. Only it reminds us of what depression usually blocks us from seeing through our narrowed vision: there, indeed, exists a world outside with its own designs and no interest in entertaining the human ego. Kristine can expect as much active listening from the universe as from her sisters.
A layer of the story that stood out for me concerned another calibre of violence – classism. The sisters dismiss Lukas at first, and to some extent their hesitation and fear are reasonable (considering the gender side-of-things, with Even having departed back to Oslo). However, their refusal is immediate and harsh as they give Lukas, a stranded farmer in worn out work clothes, a very cold shoulder. Cityfolk behaviour, licensed by neoliberal, urban jadedness. The sisters’ attitude to Lukas suggests offence over the inconvenience he is causing them, and just a shade of condescension, too.
Just how sheltered the sisters’ lives are is revealed in one of Kristine’s flashbacks, in which her girlfriend asserts that the sisters come from wealth, a fact met with a bizarre yet telling response. Kristine defends herself: they’re not rich… just because they were each given an Oslo apartment and do not need to work. This sort of bourgeois naïveté adds an interesting angle to Kristine’s struggles. She is very much lost because she has the time and space to struggle with herself, not being preoccupied by financial struggles.
Of course, alienation is not predicated on class. The way she copes with social settings by keeping herself busy through getting drunk, or hiding in the bathroom after inability to participate in conversation – it speaks of overwhelm and disquiet I recognise only too well. The dinner-party conversations in the family notably intimidate her – maybe she’s afraid to say something stupid, to embarrass herself. Fear of failure fuels her life’s aimlessness, with a standard set high by their successful, yet severe mother.
A flashback to a dinner party, in which Kristine grows increasingly self-conscious as Even sets out to humiliate Cecilie’s flirt Adrian (Steinar Klouman Hallert), summarises the prevailing disdain for opinions not intellectually rigorous enough (in other words, the ‘plebs’.) Even is quite a wanker, high-handed and crass, and sneers at Adrian’s enthusiasm for the idea of a multiverse he picks up from the Spiderman animated film. Not that Adrian’s semi-coherent proclamations aren’t questionable – it’s the manner of his drilling that reeks.
In any case, it’s a dinner party like any other: men dominate the communication space and women retreat into its margins. For an instant, Kristine sees Lukas in the room, dressed as a house painter—the threat of the present trespassing on the past. I cannot help but feel that his new working-class profession is pointed. The curious flash riffs on Adrian’s idea of multidimensionality, while suggesting that Lukas might be a fatalist apparition, bound to interfere with the family’s urbane seclusion no matter what dimension they inhabit. Could he be a personification of Kristine’s shame and guilt?
Her memories, gorgeously shot on 16 mm film, are succulent but, in fact, quite vapid. It’s like she is trying to romanticise her depression, but there isn’t much to utilise. No artistry to extract from her pain, no high-stakes melodrama. This wasn’t even her first suicide attempt, and the family still seems not to treat her seriously. This is a duller, more realistic depiction of depression. Her quiet trauma of being the overlooked, timid member of the broken family, accompanied by too-comfortable a life, only maintains her stagnation.
Then again, how could she meaningfully assert herself? In this family, everything said or done is examined, suspected to be self-serving. A double-edged sin, a sensitivity caused by, perhaps, the mother wound. One that ends up causing them not to see each other fully, nor to see past their own pain.
Kristine’s ruminations on her past become somewhat ridiculous in their insistence, given that Demring, at this point, is fully in thriller territory. The pitting of the two moods – one sophisticated, introspective, disconnected from the wider world, while the other active, “lowbrow” chills & thrills kind – against each other recall class tensions between the characters. Due to this jarring contrast, as a spectator I feel invited to critically reflect on both.
Dwelling on the horror aspect here would require to reveal the plot. Even so, I might indulge that I found that the way Demring plays with Chekhov’s gun and foreshadowing in order to destabilise horror conventions is quite exciting.
The chief takeaway of Demring is that our inner demons, sufferings and whatnot… they don’t matter at all. Not in the grand scheme of this divinely indifferent universe. What one could do is maybe take oneself less seriously, and resist the impulse towards indifference. Strange how life-affirming it is, after all.
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