Set in the 1600s and filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) is a harrowing account of individual helplessness in the face of growing social repression and paranoia. Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Exquisitely photographed and passionately acted, Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience. Part of The Criterion Collection.
“Day of Wrath” takes place in a beautiful, bucolic Denmark, with painterly, Rembrandt-worthy images of shadow and light capturing the joys of a new spring and the sensual pleasures of a romantic tryst. But fear and suspicion loom over everything. It’s the 1600s and suspected witches are being routed out and burned at the stake. The woman with a glint in her eye, or the one whose laugh has a new inflection – perhaps they’re in league with the Devil? – BFI
Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene, it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn’t so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance. – ReelTalk Movie Reviews
However bleak, Day of Wrath is a masterpiece. See it. – New York Observer
Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene, it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn’t so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance. – Chicago Reader
In black and white.
In Danish with English subtitles.
Starring Kirsten Andreasen, Sigurd Berg, Albert Høeberg, Harald Holst, Emanuel Jørgensen.
Note: This is available as part of the Carl Theodor Dreyer Box Set. which also includes Ordet, and Gertrud. Each is an intense exploration of the clash between individual desire and social expectations, with Dreyer’s famously perfectionist attention to detail shining throughout. You may also be interested in [Witchfinder General (1968](http://amzn.to/1YEOPh8)): “Among British cinema’s most unforgettable dramatisations of the hysteria and unrest of the English civil war period (and a key reference point for [A Field in England](http://amzn.to/1YEOSti)), Michael Reeves’s film stars Vincent Price as the diabolical 17th-century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins.” – BFI Set during the time of Cromwell’s reign (1653 – 1658). Not for the faint of heart.