A debut Danish horror that uses Jewish folklore not as shock decoration but as the architecture of an already complicated kind of closeness.

Maja, a former stage actress from Copenhagen going nowhere in particular, meets Leah at a theatre and follows her feeling for something like purpose. The two fall into each other quickly — Danish ease, English charm — and Leah’s suggestion that Maja move to London with her seems like the obvious continuation. But almost from the moment they arrive, the plan slips. Leah suffers a seizure, apparently neurological, and the apartment she has always shared with her mother Chana becomes a fixed point the film never really leaves. From that claustrophobic domestic space, Gabriel Bier Gislason builds a slow-burn possession story out of proximity, obligation, and the particular discomfort of loving someone whose family you cannot read.

Attachment is Gislason’s debut feature — he also wrote the screenplay — and the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 before a second outing at Fantastic Fest. The leads are Josephine Park as Maja, Ellie Kendrick as Leah, and Sofie Gråbøl as Chana; David Dencik appears in a supporting role as a scholar whose expertise makes him inadvertently useful to the unfolding situation.

Where possession horror typically uses folklore as spectacle — the trembling body, the backwards crawl, the impossible voice — Attachment uses a dybbuk, a displaced soul from Jewish tradition, as structural logic. Gislason’s interest lies less in whether possession is actually happening than in what it means that the people in this apartment have been living inside this belief already, shaping their lives around it. Chana’s domineering protectiveness, the rituals she keeps, the invisible lines she draws that Maja cannot see until she has crossed them: all of this reads as maternal control right up until the moment it reads as something else entirely.

Sofie Gråbøl, internationally known for the television series The Killing, carries the slow middle of the film with a performance of concentrated quiet. Chana is never histrionic; her power comes from withdrawal and deliberateness, which is harder to sustain on screen than outright menace, and Gråbøl sustains it. Josephine Park and Ellie Kendrick handle the opening stretch with enough warmth that the film earns the stranger distance that follows.

Attachment works best when it leaves the folklore unexplained for the longest possible stretch — when it trusts the architecture of the belief to carry narrative weight without a clarifying line of dialogue. Its deliberate pace asks for patience it does not always reward, and the final act resolves the mystery with more efficiency than dread. But as debuts go, this is a filmmaker who knows what he is interested in: not whether a legend is true, but what it costs a family to have built itself around one.

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