Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The devil epileptically dancing the beauty of the world in front of the eyes of a dying man, the victim of his deceit and evil schemes, how cruel, ironic and jaw-droppingly macabre that can be... and the dark blue unctuous atmosphere, the claustrophobic feeling that the mazy woods, the snow give despite the haywire dynamics in an open landscape, people like pawns spinning on a chessboard manipulated and controlled through their weaknesses by master puppeteers who use lust and envy and madness as levers of their domination, God represented by the constant presence of the nun, witnessing with a neutral frozen mercifulness the gyratory display of human delirium and the devil's catalytic actions.. I know now that only after seeing this sublime film and being impacted by it I've became a true Żuławski fan

Depravity, violence, a world permanently tipped off balance.Near the end our halfmad protagonist asks someone else if he sees the world ugly because of his illness or because it is. The other replies that the world is filled with beauty, flowers, fruit, women, then reasons that he cannot adequately describe it. Instead he will dance about it.His dance is not beautiful though, it's a wild spasmodic flailing of arms like we're seeing an epileptic suffer a seizure.Diabel is that dance.Superficially an allegory on how revolutions become mired in distraction - the political hedonism of power? - and how Poland has been used and abused by so many, deeper we find the same frightful pantomime that made Possession such a terrifying beast: inner soul made visible.Slight problem is that he does not abstract enough to hit that bedrock were every image becomes multi-layered utterance of different cosmii. Characters remain pieces of the allegoric jigsaw, pawns in a game. There is not enough emptiness from life to pour into.

In Poland, a mysterious man comes to a chaotic convent to bring to Warsaw the nobleman political prisoner Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) that imprisoned in the dungeons. The stranger requests the list of fellow conspirators to Jakub and abducts a nun to travel with Jakub in his journey back home. When he arrives in his destroyed house, he sees his father dead; his sister abused and insane; his mother in a brothel; and his girlfriend pregnant and living with his former best friend. Jakub becomes deranged and using a razor delivered by the stranger, he kills each sinner, in an irrational period of chaos and moral degradation. "Diabel" is a messy, pointless and violent journey to insanity. The writer and director Andrzej Zulawski makes a dreadful film, with a screenplay that does not tell the milestone when the story takes place. In accordance with the DVD cover, the period is 1793, during the invasion of Poland by the Prussian army. The performances are histrionic and theatrical, and the violence is stupid with the only intention of shocking the audience. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Diabel"

The previous poster calls the cruelty at display in this film "inhuman". Oh really? How come then that people slaughter people, gouge their eyes out, cut their limbs or burn them alive? Or torture them? Or rape and mutilate women? He should read some reports about practices during the Bosnian war or wars in Africa, about the stuff people have been doing to other people for ages, for reasons like religion, greed or lust. Or for no reasons at all. It took real "balls" or creative guts from the filmmaker to do a film like that. I am fed up with the political correctness and general blandness of films, caused by the requirements of market and profits, or by mere cowardliness. I could understand criticism of the cruelty if it was purely gratuitous but it is not. This film has artistic values and touches upon important topics. I am happy it was not destroyed and all copies not locked up somewhere. It could probably happen in Hollywood or in the lands like Iran.