DEAD BY DAWN. Giallo polo – Genre Cinema from Poland

Dead by Dawn, directed by first-time filmmaker Dawid Torrone, is the first Polish film in the originally Italian horror subgenre known as giallo. My editorial colleague Mariusz Czernic once described giallo as a genre influenced by crime literature and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, combining British elegance and style, formal experimentation, a gradual departure from realism, a touch of romanticism, and the conviction that every person is a potential murderer.

Although this type of horror was born in Italy in the 1960s and truly blossomed in the following decade, Torrone’s experiment is, of course, not the first modern love letter to that aesthetic. Across the ocean, we’ve had the highly successful Malignant by James Wan or the mediocre MaXXXine by Ti West. Unfortunately, even compared to the disappointing conclusion to Mia Goth’s trilogy, Torrone’s film comes off as very weak.

Dead By Dawn tells the story of a group of young artists who arrive at a theater in the heart of the town of Katusze, where preparations are underway to stage the opus magnum of a playwright as famous as he is mysterious—Heissenhoff. However, everything suggests that the venue is cursed, and someone has sentenced the group—now cut off from the world by a raging storm—to death. And although on paper all of this sounds like a great genre ride, I feel that Torrone’s creativity stopped at the idea of creating a Polish giallo (charmingly referred to by the creators as giallo polo). In his feature-length debut, where he also served as the screenwriter, that idea never truly develops.

The story told in the film is flimsy, not to say incoherent. A large portion of the screen time is taken up by the staging of the theater play itself, through which we get a hefty dose of pretentious musings on the figure of God. When we finally escape that, Torrone has his characters deliver digressive monologues—about women’s plastic surgeries, the state of commercial cinema, or even the character of Batman (going so far as to make one of the characters quote a popular meme as a joke). And sure, all of this could be defended as intentional stylization, a deliberate exposure of the genre’s B-movie roots—but I just can’t buy it. In the end, the audience is forced to listen to these dull musings for most of the screening, finding little joy in any of it.

At the same time, there’s very little horror, very little giallo. There’s no room for intrigue, no mystery, not even any eroticism. The narrative threads are barely sketched out. Visually, everything feels muted, subdued, quiet. The use of hip-hop (twice) on the soundtrack breaks the atmosphere. And although we do see splashes of strangely watery blood and the killer’s trademark black leather gloves (his overall appearance is actually very satisfying and stands out as the film’s most interesting element), it feels like the creator has done his genre-film homework—but hasn’t truly learned much from it.

I had the opportunity to see Dead By Dawn at this year’s edition of the Octopus Film Festival, where it served as the opening film and the first public screening of Dawid Torrone’s debut. The director himself was present in the theater, along with the production team on both sides of the camera. Torrone showed clear passion and pride, and the crew shared in the joy of experiencing the work they had created together. And that’s great—because we need genre cinema in Poland. The road to its flourishing will surely be full of stumbles, but I hope the creators won’t abandon it. And despite everything, I am looking forward to Torrone’s next film. Just let it not be another exercise in style. Let the characters resist the urge to comment on every topic unrelated to the plot.