DAY OF WRATH Movie Review

Vredens Dag

Of the 14 films that Denmark's Carl Dreyer completed during his 60-year career, few received significant distribution here, and even fewer are seen much today. His 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc and his 1932 Vampyr are probably his best known in the U.S.; less seen is Dreyer's great 1943 Day of Wrath, the story of a young 17th-century woman who falls in love with her stepson, and is tried and burned as a witch after her husband—a pastor—dies. This is a majestic and uncompromising movie, inexorably moving us toward that point at which a victim is so thoroughly overwhelmed by her accusers that she no longer has the luxury of recognizing reality; she becomes, in a sense, the otherworldly creature she is accused of being. That the viewer can understand her final inner state is proof of Dreyer's genius. His stark images and dreamlike pacing have the searing inevitability of being conveyed into a psychological crematorium—which will soon become real—as inch by inch we're encompassed by her nightmare until at some final instant of higher awareness, it all makes a kind of mad, simple sense. Dreyer's honesty and aversion to cheap or easy manipulation of emotion has traditionally led the attention-span-challenged to dismiss him as tedious or boring (The New York Times's Bosley Crowther called Day of Wrath's “slow and ponderous tempo...a presumptuous imposition”), but others, such as screenwriters James Agee (Night of the Hunter) and Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), have written eloquently about Dreyer's style and his ability to express the seemingly inexpressible on screen.

NEXT STOP … The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Confession, The Last Temptation of Christ

1943 110m/B Dk Thorkild Roose, Sigrid Neiiendam, Lisbeth Movin, Preben Lerdorff, Anna Svierker; D: Carl Theodor Dreyer; W: Carl Theodor Dreyer; C: Karl Andersson; M: Poul Schierbeck. VHS HTV, NOS, SNC