Vredens dag

Plot synopsis:
In a Danish village in 1623, an old woman known as Herlof's Marte is accused of witchcraft. Anne, a young woman, is married to the aged local pastor, Absalon Pedersson, who is involved with the trials of witches, and they live in a house shared with his strict, domineering mother Meret. Meret does not approve of Anne, who is much younger than her husband, being about the same age as the son from his first marriage. Anne gives Herlof's Marte refuge, but Marte is soon discovered in the house, though she is presumed to have hidden herself there without assistance. Herlof's Marte knows that Anne's mother, already dead at the time of the events depicted, had been accused of witchcraft as well, and had been spared thanks to Absalon's intervention, who aimed at marrying young Anne. Anne is thus informed by Herlof's Marte of her mother's power over people's life and death and becomes intrigued in the matter.
Absalon's son from his first marriage, Martin, returns home from abroad and he and Anne are immediately attracted to each other. She does not love her husband and thinks he does not love her. Under torture, Herlof's Marte confesses to witchcraft, defined among other evidence as wishing for the death of other people. She threatens to expose Anne if Absalon does not rescue her from a guilty verdict, begging him to save her as he saved Anne's mother. Marte, after pleading with Absalon a second time, does not betray his secret and is executed by burning with the villagers looking on. Absalon feels his guilt over having saved Anne's mother, but leaving Marte to burn. Anne and Martin, clandestinely growing closer, are seen as having changed in recent days, fueling Meret's suspicion of Anne's character. Anne is heard laughing in Martin's company by her husband, something which has not occurred in their time together. Absalon regrets that he married Anne without regarding her feelings and true intentions, and tells her so, apologizing for stealing her youth and happiness.
A violent storm erupts while Absalon is away visiting a dying young parishioner, Laurentius. He had been cursed by Herlof's Marte during her interrogation and she foretold an imminent death. Meanwhile, Anne and Martin are discussing the future, and she is forced to admit wishing her husband dead, but only as an "if" rather than it actually happening. At that moment Absalon, on his way home, feels "like the touching of Death itself." On Absalon's return, Anne confesses her love for Martin to her husband and tells him she wishes him dead. He collapses and dies, calling Martin's name. Anne screams. The following morning Martin is overcome by his own doubts. Anne declares that she had nothing to do with his father's death, which she sees as providential help from above to release her from her present misery and unhappy marriage. At Absalon's funeral, Anne is denounced by Meret, her mother-in-law, as a witch. Anne initially denies the charge, but when Martin sides with his grandmother she is faced with the loss of his love and trust, and she confesses on her husband's open coffin that she murdered him and enchanted his son with the Devil's help. Her fate appears sealed.

Tags: bleak

Review:
In Majorem Gloriam Dei. Dreyer's pictures are absolutely mind-boggling .We seem to be in a Rembrandt's or Georges de la Tour's painting.He works with his camera the way a painter does with light to create different textures ,highlights and shadows.The scenes inside the minister's house where the world is still the prey of the good/evil concept are in direct contrast to those ,luminous and pastoral,where the lovers try to reinvent life:some kind of Garden of Eden,which the apple tree on the picture has promised.Anne's passion was doomed from the start:her situation recalls that of Phaedra:both are pure even in sin,both are victims of an implacable heredity.Even before Martin's appearance ,the over-possessive mother leaves her no chance at all.Remarkable sequences: the old woman's "trial",her tortures,her screams (I'm not afraid of Heaven or Hell ,I'm afraid to die!" Her death at the stake ,with Ann looking through the window pane ,and realizing it's an omen.The children singing terrifying canticles about God's wrath.The minister beginning to wonder if his faith is strong enough and the wife's infamous revelation.The nature which was a refuge, the only sunlight the lovers could get,becomes misty ,almost dark,as the young man has lost all his hopes and illusions."No,Ann says ,it all begins" It's the seventeenth century and Ann is too ahead of her time.She and the old woman are the real human beings in the movie:the minister and his sinister mother are already dead when the film begins as much as the dying man he comforts in his last hour .Martin has got himself tangled up in remorse,superstitions (You've got a magic power) and if life means rebellion and fight ,his surrender leaves him a living dead.The old woman ,the "witch" ,is afraid to die,which is human:Jeanne D'Arc herself,another "witch" which inspired CT Dreyer had her moments of doubt and fear,and she abjured to save her life ."Vredens Dag" can still grab today's audience.This is a must..
(BTW, I liked MisterWhiplash's 1/19/2006 comments.) Dreyer's "Day of Wrath" is a terrifying trip back to the early seventeenth century, only without modern conveniences like motor vehicles to get one the Heck out of a crazy community on a perpetual witch hunt.
Each location is pleasant, hopeful, and a complete contrast to home life with Absalon.Dreyer's film achieves greatness as he opens the scant possibility that maybe Anne is really a witch after all.
Films dealing with questions of faith and religion have fascinated me for a while from the likes of Bergman, Bunuel and even Scorsese, but Dreyer taps particularly well into the plights of those to be sacrificed in the name of 'the Lord'.
Conscience from within, who knows.Dreyer centers his story circa 17th century Denmark around Bishop Absalom (Alber Hoeberg, in a mostly haunted performance), his mother, his son Martin, and his recent wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin, not quite the face of Falconetti, but still stands powerful on its own).
It's a story not rushed at all, and gives some of the most beautiful shots in any of his films; the scenes of Martin and Anne by the riverside, in complete silhouette; the constant usage of medium shots still capturing the full outreach of the performers; the precious close-ups bringing forth his precise, masterful use of light and dark.
Absalom may not be a bad man, but as a soul with his life into judging others, ones that might love him stray away.It leaves me with questions that leave bitter, difficult and long answers, which is really what the best filmmakers tend to do for me sometimes, though at the same time always keeping the dramatic &/or just theatrical aspects of the film in enough control to really hit home.
As in other Dreyer's films, simple actions become memorable moments through the director's portrait and comment of them, like when the young son drinks from Anne's hands like a docile dog or the lovers' kissing behind the grass.
One of Dreyer's most accessible works; it has a dramatic story (witch hunting!) and still investigates the characters' morality and their relation to the world they exist in.
This is Dreyer's most overtly sexual film, where sex is a weapon (that eventually leads to a death); we see the relationship between the young girl, Anne, who falls in love with her much older husband's son (the same actor who played Johannes in Dreyer's next great film, "Ordet"), and, by the end of the film, we see that she has cast her spell on him, and is herself to be accused of being a witch.
Dreyer's films, which got more difficult as he got older, don't seem to have a date; certainly period pieces like this exist in a certain time, but put "Day of Wrath" next to "Gertrud" and you'd hardly notice a twenty year difference -- or few hundred years difference, in terms of the setting.
He is also one of the great directors of women, and here elicits excellent performances from his entire cast (keeping in mind the date of production) but especially those of the two mothers in the film, the one who is put to the stake, and the other who is the mother to Anne's much older husband.
Much like his earlier 'Passion of the Joan of Ark', Danish genius Carl Theodor Dreyer has created a film rich with religious tones that includes themes of witchcraft and the power of belief.
Day of Wrath is certainly not a film for everyone, and people that dislike thought provoking, yet completely style-less pieces of art should steer clear.
Day of Wrath (1943) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Carl Theodor Dreyer's dark tale about a Reverend (Thorkild Roose) who allows a woman to be burned at the stake for being a witch only to eventually lose his much younger wife (Lisbeth Movin) to his own son (Preben Lerdorff Rye).
DAY OF WRATH is a very open and honest look at religion and love and I think it ranks as one of the director's best films..
Dreyer's movies are a real treat to watch as they all have an engaging and unique drama and the acting and dialogues are top-notch.'Day of Wrath' is an awesome watch if you fancy some interesting drama.
The film is set in 17th century Denmark amidst the height of the witch hunting that swept europe as a means to wipe out the indigenous people in order to infect it with the middle eastern abrahamic religions.Anne, the protagonist of the film is surrounded by all the negative energies that feed on her innocent childlike soul, a loveless marriage, a mother in law that despises her, and in the background we see the horror and mad hysteria of a society where the church is handed total authority to torture and execute those who do not fit into their cult.
You could be forgiving in thinking that the priests and pastors who wielded power were actually possessed and worshipping a demon themselves rather than the people they denounced as witches and heretics, giving how blood thirsty and psychopathic they were in their actions.Dreyers "Day Of Wrath" is the perfect companion piece to his earlier masterpiece "The Passion Of Joan Of Arc".
We still care for Anne even when she curses the pastor to die as her yearning to be set free is evident through the film and brings her to this level of hating a man who basically kidnaps and imprisons her with a life of strict control and misery.The scene where Anne and the pastors son Martin spend the day together allows the viewer to put his guard down, as everything up to that point was bleak and dispiriting.
Here we see two people falling in love and Dreyer shows us the beauty in the landscapes, the slow camera movements hypnotic to the eye, our protagonist finally experiencing love for the first time even if it is like a forbidden fruit to eat given how the one she falls for is her step son.
A 17th century drama about the antediluvian act of witchery persecution and the excruciating human benightedness inflicted by religious indoctrination, Carl Theodor Dreyer's DAY OF WRATH is a sublimely slow-paced threnody that sets to shock and awe.
Prior to Ingmar Bergman's soul-searching felicity in psychoanalyzing our mentation on the existential basis, on that same Scandinavian land, Dreyer's more clinical and religion-inflected study has already plunged its scalpel into the realm of complex and DAY OF WRATH, albeit its archaic subject matter, is a cinematic accomplishment nonpareil.In the central there is a simple moral allegory, Anne (Movin) is the much younger wife of the gaunt rector Absalon (Roose), she falls for the latter's adult son Martin (Rye) from his first marriage, and her feeling is reciprocated, but their forbidden affair can never reach a happy ending because of the overshadowing witch-hunting, an example has been set by an elderly woman Marte (Svierkier), who has been accused as such and is subjected to the stake for immolation and before perishing, an anguished Marte implores Absalon in vain to save her just like he has bailed out Anne's mother from the same undoing, which also explains his unbefitting union with Anne in the first place.
Dreyer channels a more animated and poignant performance out of Lisbeth Movin's Anne in tandem with a stiffer and more forthright acting bent of other thespians, and incredibly constructs a solemn chiaroscuro environment out of its austere setting with superb compositional choices (awe-striking portraitures galore) and camera mobility, the film is draped with a vampiric ominousness even in the outdoor scenes, which is not relieved by the portentous score.
The film's highlights are the opening witch hunt and burning and Anne's (Movin) final speech, one which lingers in its ambiguities long after the film ends.I must warn you, though, that Day of Wrath can be tremendously slow.
A much better film would have treated these events (17th Century witch-hunts) as ambiguous, which would have added dramatic irony, just as they would in real life.
His speed figures are Zero.The story is one of a one dimensionally evil society, with a monster for a parson, who burns a feeble old lady under the guise of her being a witch, and who is married to a woman younger than his son by a previous marriage.The parson is so vicious and hypocritical, that the movie comes across as a joke.
It contains witch burning and mild language.Following this (frankly superb) warning, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day Of Wrath opens with a thundering, ominous hymn and the shadow of a giant crucifix displayed across the screen.
But that would be to turn a blind eye to the real engines that power ignorance and delusion all around us, these haven't changed a bit since Dreyer's time or the 1600s.The film begins and ends with horrible punishment at the hands of a cruel establishment; but it's the unswathing of the soul in that interim space where people are alone with the questions they have about each other that matters.
Let the story of religious persecution subside and this is about ordinary people who struggle with what they feel moves them.A man betrayed his austere god, from his own end, when he allowed a 'witch' to go unpunished so he could take her beautiful daughter for a wife.
Which necessarily means spoiling the ending (not that you're likely to be in too much doubt as you watch a movie entitled Day of Wrath).
I know this wasn't Dreyer's intention, but while watching this film I couldn't help but think of the plight of women under the Taliban and other repressive regimes, and that even as I write this a young woman in Nigeria is under a death sentence by an Islamic court for having sex outside of marriage; it is a sad reminder that what happens in this film is still going on today, and perhaps will still be going on until the earth ends.
Set in a Danish village in the early 1600s at a time of suspicion and repression, both stemming from religion, it tells the story of Anna, the young second wife of a much older reverend, who has recently allowed the burning of an elderly women accused of witchcraft, and her romance with the quiet son of the reverend.
Reverend Absalom(Thorkild Roose, whose face expresses such aching and longing)has recently wed a lovely, but cold, and much younger Anne(Lisbeth Moven, another actress strikingly filmed by Dreyer)who was actually the daughter of a witch.
When Absalon doesn't, the witch curses him and the rest of the film follows his crisis of guilt and shame, as his recently returned son, Martin(Preben Neergaard)is "bewitched" by Anne.
Absalon's mother, Merete(Sigrid Neiiendam)hates Anne(..one senses her disregard for possibly "bewitching" Absalon with her youth and beauty)and doesn't hide this, finding that her son is truly disturbed and distressed ever since the witch's death.
While the film follows the blossoming love between Martin and Anne, we also see how Absalon deals with "robbing" his wife of her youth.
An important sub-plot Absalon visiting a dying priest, Laurentius(Olaf Ussing), who was cursed to die by the witch shortly after torturing a confession from her.I liked how director Carl Theodor Dreyer keeps the possibility of real witchcraft ambiguous.
That caused her to developed a very deep hatred for him which his mother Merete spotted, if Absalon didn't, right away.Meanwhile Herlofs is tried for the crime of witchcraft and begs Absalon, who's to decide her fate, to spear her life like he speared his wife's Anne mothers life but this time he sticks to his guns, not wanting to make the same mistake twice, and sentences her to be burned at the stake.
A must see film, moving to the point of being over-powering by the end.The characters are shown in all their human frailty, from the guilt ridden pastor to his hateful old mother, his unhappy young wife and idealistic son.
It's astonishing to consider the power Day of Wrath (1943) wields; coming from Nazi-occupied Denmark and directed by respected Danish filmmaker Carl Th. Dreyer, it is a total masterpiece as gripping today as ever.The film is one of several to dramatize a dark chapter in European history, the persecution of people accused of witchcraft.
Anne is a great character- Absalon's mother and son see a fire in her eyes suggestive of a strong, independent woman, as well as someone deep.
When Anne meets Absalon's son, Martin, who's her own age, they fall in love and share an affair that brings some real romance into the film.It really doesn't feel Anne has bewitched Martin by any supernatural means, although she does flirt with the idea of being able to summon him.
As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote for The Criterion Collection, "We can believe that the characters, oppressed by sexual repression, conjure up fantasies about witches; or we can believe that witches really exist, and this story is showing us how one particular society, working through the church, produces them." Day of Wrath is thus a film that may not be just one thing- and any way, is a disturbing and profound piece of cinema..
It is up to God to judge them.An old woman named Herlofs Marte is hunted in town as a witch, driving her to the estate of Absolon Pederson, where his young wife Anne attempts to hide her.
This is never made more clear than at the film's end, where the psychologically fragile Anne (Lisbeth Movin) is betrayed by her horrid mother-in-law, her lover, and her own psyche, and actually comes to believe in her own guilt of being a witch, for wishing the death of her aged husband.
Emotionally, it's fairly difficult to come to grips with a story in which the only character with any degree of integrity is the old woman who is burned as a witch early on.
After the first 35 minutes (which were, admittedly, well-done), I felt like this film made so many mistakes in terms of handling buildup and pacing that I could simply not enjoy it.In Denmark in the 17th century, a family is effected by a merciless witch hunt.
After an elderly woman named Herlof Marte is accused of being a witch by a pastor named Absalon, his wife, Anne, falls in love with Martin, the pastor's son.
***SPOILERS*** As deliberate as THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC and VAMPYR (the only other Dreyer films I've seen), DAY OF WRATH, made (ironically enough) during the Nazi occupation of Sweden, is a chilling look at ostracism.
'Vredens Dag' or 'Day of Wrath' has a mysterious, unsettling atmosphere quite like Dreyer's previous film 'Vampyr', but it's very understated here.
One gets the impression that a woman can be made to burn at the stake by being denounced as a witch by seemingly anyone who feels like it.
The big ambiguity in this film is that although the Christian doctrine could hardly be shown less favorably Rev. Absalon is basically a kind-hearted and well-intentioned man and husband to Anne, but more significantly Anne's liberation from her life of oppression makes her happy, a happiness and joyfulness that not only has the side effect of turning her selfish (as she has no consideration anymore for anyone else's feelings and needs), but through Dreyer's compositions and lighting and by how the actress plays her, she comes off as evil, she is subtly made to look like the witch that she is believed to be by others, and whom even herself comes to believe to be.As we all know, women are quite a mystery to men, and in this story woman's sexuality poses the biggest mystery of all, implying that men can't bare such an enormous lack of control, therefore the woman's behavior and her power over people and over men especially can only be explained with witchcraft.