Gabriel Bier Gislason’s debut takes a Copenhagen romance to London, where a Jewish legend about possession has been waiting in the walls.

Maja, a Danish former actress, meets Leah at a theatre in Copenhagen. The chemistry is easy and the move to London together feels like a natural next step — until a minor accident grounds Leah and pulls both of them into the apartment where Chana, Leah’s quietly domineering mother, runs something between a household and a vigil. From there, Attachment is about a different kind of closeness: strange physical episodes, obsessive rituals, and the gathering sense that Chana’s protectiveness extends somewhere that has no secular name.

Attachment is the debut feature from Danish director Gabriel Bier Gislason, who also wrote the screenplay. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 and later screened at Fantastic Fest, with Josephine Park as Maja, Ellie Kendrick as Leah, Sofie Gråbøl as Chana, and David Dencik in a supporting role as a scholar drawn into the investigation.

Where most possession films lean on the spectacle of a body losing control, Attachment works through suggestion and domestic weight. The dybbuk — a displaced soul from Jewish tradition that clings to the living — is treated not as a genre device but as a structural logic the film reveals slowly and backwards. Gislason is less interested in whether the possession is happening than in what it means that a belief this old has been shaping a modern family, and what it costs someone who came into that family from outside.

Sofie Gråbøl, known internationally for The Killing, brings a contained intensity to Chana that is the film’s real engine. Her performance holds the slow build where the pacing might otherwise lose traction, and gives the folkloric mechanics a human weight they would otherwise lack. Josephine Park and Ellie Kendrick are persuasive in the opening stretch and earn the stranger territory that follows.

Attachment is most coherent when it trusts Jewish folklore to carry its own rules — and trusts the audience enough not to over-explain them. That restraint is what separates it from more routine possession horror, even in the stretches where the deliberate pace works against it. A debut feature that shows a filmmaker more interested in what a legend means than in what it does.

Tags: Sofie Gråbøl, David Dencik, Ellie Kendrick, Gabriel Bier Gislason, Josephine Park, queer horror