Gabriel Bier Gislason’s first feature takes the dybbuk, the clinging soul of Jewish folklore, and sets it inside the first months of a relationship between two women — with one girlfriend’s mother standing guard at the door.

Attachment begins as a romance and holds that shape for longer than most horror films would dare. Maja, a Danish actress whose career has run out of road, meets Leah, a Jewish academic visiting Copenhagen from the UK, and the two fall for each other fast. Within weeks Maja has followed Leah back to London, and a seizure Leah suffers draws the couple into the orbit of her mother, Chana, who lives close at hand and keeps watch over everything. What first looks like an overprotective parent and a religious culture Maja does not know turns, by degrees, into something much older: the suggestion that a dybbuk has attached itself to the family.

The film is the first feature from Danish writer-director Gabriel Bier Gislason, who wrote the screenplay himself. Its Danish title is Natten har øjne, which translates as “the night has eyes”, and it was produced by Thomas Heinesen, with TrustNordisk handling international sales. It had its world premiere in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, opened in Danish cinemas that summer and travelled to Fantastic Fest in Austin in the autumn. Shudder, the horror streaming service owned by AMC Networks, picked it up and began streaming it on February 9, 2023, which is how most English-speaking audiences first came across it.

The cast is drawn from two film industries. Josephine Park plays Maja. Ellie Kendrick, known to television audiences as Meera Reed in Game of Thrones and, before that, as the lead of the BBC‘s 2009 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, plays Leah. Sofie Gråbøl, the Danish actress who became recognisable far beyond Scandinavia as detective Sarah Lund in Forbrydelsen (The Killing), plays Chana. David Dencik, whose English-language credits include Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, HBO’s Chernobyl and the James Bond film No Time to Die, completes the principal cast as Lev.

The dybbuk is a figure from Ashkenazi Jewish folklore: the restless soul of a dead person that clings to a living body — that “attaches” to it, which is the pun folded into the English title. Its best-known treatment is S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, written in the 1910s and first staged by the Vilna Troupe in 1920, which became the 1937 Yiddish-language film Der Dibuk, directed in Poland by Michał Waszyński. In Ansky’s version the possession grows out of a love the community will not permit, and the bride at the centre of it is called Leah. Attachment’s choice of names — a Leah, and a mother called Chana — sits close to that source, and the film moves the forbidden love at the heart of the old story into a relationship between two women.

Screen horror has returned to the dybbuk several times this century. The Possession (2012), produced by Sam Raimi, was directed by another Dane, Ole Bornedal, and built its premise around a dybbuk box bought at a yard sale. Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) placed a dybbuk at a Polish wedding, and Keith Thomas’s The Vigil (2019) set its spirit loose during a night-long shmira, the Jewish ritual of watching over the dead, in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community. Attachment arrived in that company with a different centre of gravity. Its possession plot is the engine for a story about an outsider trying to enter a family that has rules nobody has explained to her.

That outsider position is where the love story does structural work rather than decorative work. Maja is not Jewish, does not know the prayers or the customs of the house, and arrives as the new girlfriend of a woman whose mother has every reason to be wary. Chana’s hostility could be read as religious conservatism, as discomfort with her daughter’s relationship, or simply as the fierce protectiveness of a mother whose child is unwell, and the premise allows all three readings at once. The horror question — is something supernatural happening to Leah? — runs alongside a more ordinary one that anyone who has met a partner’s parents will recognise: what is this family not telling me?

The film belongs to a strand of recent horror that has moved queer characters from the margins of genre stories to their centre, a strand Shudder in particular has spent the last several years acquiring and promoting. Here the relationship is not the twist or the threat; it is the premise from which everything else follows. Maja and Leah are a couple before they are characters in a ghost story, and the stakes of the possession plot are the stakes of their relationship.

It is also part of a lineage of household horror built around a parent and a home, the territory of Ari Aster‘s Hereditary or Natalie Erika James’s Relic, where the haunting and the family history turn out to be the same thing. Attachment narrows that idea to a single mother and a single daughter, and to the question of what Chana has been guarding against, and for how long.

Casting Sofie Gråbøl as the mother is the film’s most legible choice. Across three series of Forbrydelsen she defined the Nordic-noir detective for an international audience, and she has since worked across Danish and British television, including Sky’s Fortitude. Putting an actress with that screen history in the role of a guarded matriarch in a London household gives a debut genre feature a performer whom audiences across Europe already know, and a figure of authority the newcomer Maja cannot easily dismiss.

There is a broader Danish context, too. Danish directors have long moved between their own industry and English-language production, and Bornedal’s The Possession is only the most obvious example within horror. Gislason’s film does so on a much smaller scale, with a cast drawn from both countries, a story that begins in Copenhagen and moves to London, and dialogue in both Danish and English. Its funding and sales came through the Danish system, but its natural audience was always the international genre circuit that Tribeca, Fantastic Fest and Shudder serve.

For Gislason, Attachment works as a calling card: a romance with a folkloric spine, made in his home industry and placed in front of genre audiences on two continents. Its ambition is narrow and specific. It is less interested in possession as spectacle than in what a family has organised its life around, and in what it costs a newcomer to find that out.

The appeal of Attachment lies in its vantage point: a dybbuk story told from the side of the girlfriend who walks into the house knowing nothing about the rules inside it. Whether its romance or its horror lands harder will depend on what a viewer brings to it. As a first feature, it arrives with a clear sense of which old story it is retelling, and of the new character it has placed at the centre.

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