![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/opi-2-1024x576.webp\")
<\/p>\nPeople will do almost anything for a story they believe is true. They\u2019ll keep a ritual nobody remembers the reason for, avoid a road after dark, or decide a neighbor is dangerous because of something a grandmother said once. That impulse is where \u00d2PI lives, and it\u2019s why I came out of Marta Giec\u2019s feature debut more unsettled than scared. This is brutal Polish folk horror drawn from Kashubian lore, and it treats belief less as a doorway to the supernatural than as a pressure that bends everyone standing inside it.<\/p>\n
The setup is simple. Shortly before her 18th birthday, Trina (Wiktoria Kruszczy\u0144ska) watches an already complicated home life come apart when an aunt and grandmother she has never met arrive, and three generations of women find themselves bound by a secret that runs through the whole family line. Giec wrote the script with Dominika K\u0142oczewiak and has said she approached horror through magical realism, letting ordinary life slowly give way to something else. You can feel that in how long the film keeps its feet on the ground, and it doesn\u2019t show its hand until the third act. I won\u2019t either.<\/p>\n
What Gets Handed Down<\/p>\n
Folklore can be a gift. It keeps a language alive, gives a place its shape, and lets one generation hand the next something no classroom ever will. \u00d2PI never treats Kashubian tradition itself as the threat. What frightens it is how people use those stories to decide who belongs and who can be treated as dangerous. Watching it, I kept thinking about how quickly a tradition that holds a family together can turn into a reason someone outside it suffers.<\/p>\n
Family is where that harm gets passed along. Children inherit more than bedtime stories. They inherit their parents\u2019 fears and suspicions, along with obligations they never agreed to carry. Gabriela Muska\u0142a plays Trina\u2019s mother, Ula, and hers is the performance I keep coming back to, the one that makes the cost of all that inheritance feel personal rather than theoretical. Magdalena Boczarska and Iwona Bielska round out a strong ensemble, and the production design makes this world feel lived in, which matters in a film asking us to believe these women have breathed this fear their entire lives.<\/p>\n
The Wait, and Whether It\u2019s Worth It![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/iop-poster.webp\")
<\/p>\n
\u00d2PI is a true slow burn, and I mean that as a description before I mean it as a warning. There are long stretches between anything resembling a scare, and if you come in expecting something lurching out of the dark every ten minutes, you\u2019ll probably reach for your phone. Much of that quiet is deliberate and earned, because it gives the performances and the dread room to build. The trouble comes when a scene keeps going after it has made its point, because tension that should be tightening starts to slacken, and the next sequence has to rebuild what that one let go.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the line I kept drawing while watching. A film can be slow on purpose, and \u00d2PI often is, but patience only works when every extra minute is doing something, and here not all of them are. What kept me in my seat anyway were developments that are deeply disturbing, even when nothing on screen is trying to make me jump. \u00d2PI doesn\u2019t need to convince us that its monsters are real. It only needs to show us what happens when people believe in them, and it does that well enough that I\u2019d recommend it to anyone with the patience to let it work.<\/p>\n
\u00d2PI makes its North American premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which runs October 15 to 22 at Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People will do almost anything for a story they believe is true. They\u2019ll keep a ritual nobody remembers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,9156,138572,99,138573,138574,138575,138576,138577,138578,138579,9,24,63,138580,138581,138582,138583,138584,138585],"class_list":["post-376785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-horror-film-festival","tag-brooklyn-horror-film-festival-2026","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-folk-horror","tag-gabriela-muskala","tag-horror-movie-reviews","tag-indie-horror","tag-international-horror","tag-kashubian-folklore","tag-marta-giec","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opi","tag-opi-review","tag-polish-horror","tag-psychological-horror","tag-slow-burn-horror","tag-wiktoria-kruszczynska"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}