Day of Wrath

Carl Theodor Dreyer made Day of Wrath in 1943, in a Denmark under German occupation — a circumstance that has led many to read its story of denunciation and persecution as a veiled response to the times, and that prompted Dreyer himself to slip across to neutral Sweden soon after. It was the Danish master's first feature in over a decade, following the silent The Passion of Joan of Arc and the dreamlike Vampyr.

Adapted from a Norwegian play, the film unfolds 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, the camera moving with a slowness that turns dread into something almost liturgical. Lisbeth Movin plays the young wife whose awakening desire for her stepson collides with the household's rigid piety, while Dreyer holds every composition until it seems to ache.

Coolly received on release — some found its pace forbidding — the film's stature has grown steadily, and it is now counted among Dreyer's essential works and a clear influence on Ingmar Bergman and other film-makers drawn to spiritual gravity. A study of guilt, repression and the violence a fearful community visits on its own, it remains one of cinema's most rigorous meditations on faith, desire and the machinery of persecution.