Day of Wrath

Carl Theodor Dreyer made Day of Wrath in 1943, in a Denmark under German occupation. Many have read its story of denunciation and persecution as a veiled response to those years, and the circumstances prompted Dreyer himself to slip across to neutral Sweden soon after. It was his first feature in over a decade, following the silent The Passion of Joan of Arc and the dreamlike Vampyr.

Adapted from a Norwegian play, it is set in a seventeenth-century village where witch trials are a fact of life. Dreyer shoots in austere, painterly black and white, the faces lit like figures in a Dutch portrait, and the camera moves so slowly that the dread becomes almost liturgical. Lisbeth Movin plays the young wife whose awakening desire for her stepson collides with the household's rigid piety, and Dreyer holds every composition until it seems to ache.

It was coolly received on release, and some found the pace forbidding, but its standing has grown steadily over the decades. It is now counted among Dreyer's essential works, and Ingmar Bergman and other film-makers drawn to spiritual gravity plainly learned from it. Its subjects are guilt, repression and the violence a fearful community visits on its own people, and Dreyer treats faith and desire with the same unbending rigour he brings to the machinery of persecution.