Really Surprised!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Sure, now it might be difficult to appreciate this for how far it went. We've had Bergman since, Tarkovsky, Haneke most lately, they all begin here. At the time Ozu was still on his way. Bresson had yet to begin. And there's the notion of a Nazi allegory, more likely applied in retrospect, that runs the risk of reducing the work to one convenient reading that simplifies.So Dreyer was one of the first to arrive, but where to? A world distilled to purity, long quiet utterances of the camera, waxen faces sunken by inward weight, sensuous nature outside contrasted with pious suffering inside the pastor's house.Contemporary viewers might find all this a bit too musky and too archaic, something fabled from a medieval world, and watch with detached, at best aesthetic interest. 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. The film begins with the wrongdoing appearing again around him. Another woman rumored to be a witch is apprehended and begs for the same forgiveness. That's on the same day as his son is coming to visit and meets a stepmother his own age.From her own end, she has been locked in a suffocating household and loveless marriage, the young man before her is everything a woman her age would pine for. We have that life take shape as a hushed love affair, it begins with a lacy image of a woman and a boy holding hands that she stitches, then a promenade out in nature that envelops and sways with the promise.Bergman would lengthen the monologues into articulate introspection, overbearingly so, Tarkovsky would take these same long pans of the camera, set the cut further back and seep with them in and out of dreams and consciousness. Dreyer sweats out the angst with the same stoic forbearance throughout; words are measured, flows are austere. Self is not penetrated here then, by way of words or camera, we infer opaquely from the outside. It will depend on the viewer if he finds all this hypnotic or oppressive; me, I favor cessation when it leads to realization.So the household is devastated by the discovery, someone has fallen to die, love is now tainted and sinking. That's the dramatic turn of events, presbyterian. Questions I find immensely more interesting, quite apart from anything about religious persecution, is what is taking place inside these people? He reserves bitter irony for the end, now she resigns to being the character in a wretched story shaped by idiots, but points also to this fickleness to make ourselves known, to our own selves first; it seems like he was ready to love to the end, a potentially happy life ahead of them, but at the last moment he steps on the accusing side of the room. Truth sunk by belief in a story about evil powers. Does he truly believe it, does he conveniently extricate himself? It's the same delusion either way.

Just borrowing a phrase with my summary, and not trying to trivialize "Day Of Wrath", an extraordinarily powerful film. I think we in the States are not used to films as masterfully done and as impactful as this one.In the 17th century - Europe as well as in the States - witchcraft and witch hunts were all the rage, an age of ignorance during the Age Of Enlightment. How quaint and simplistic a notion that someone could be a witch just by anothers accusation! Director Carl Dreyer brings this idea home to us in this methodical masterpiece in harrowing detail. His story centers on a young Danish woman who goes from mouse-wife to temptress to doomed heroine. She is surrounded throughout the picture by hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness and in the end she succumbs to Christian ideals, the same ones she had been struggling to suppress for most of the picture.You can watch until your eyes drop out and you won't find a scene not executed to perfection in all departments. I am not familiar with the actors but they were outstanding down to the smallest part. The pacing, like a Bergman film, is slow and deliberate, much the same way it would have been lived out in the 1600's. The Inquisition-type scene involving the old accused woman is even slower still, making the scene all the more horrifying, even though the torture is in the viewers mind and not on screen. Note how slowly the camera pans around the chamber of judges.There are so many scenes worth mentioning, but it's best to see the picture for yourself if you haven't. It is an unforgettable treatment of nasty, unsavory material.

Dreyer crosses the line in several stylistically and philosophically inadmissible ways. Much of this film rests on the absurd premise that witches exist - it's not even questioned. 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. The second part of the film relies on the equal absurdity that a tedious old pastor has married a lovely young blonde girl (no explanation provided, but this subverting of sexual relationships usually means only one thing in an auteur). Stylisation is always selective, but Dreyer's method kills any emotional involvement with the characters or story. He doesn't aim for reality, only theatricality, a limited, two dimensional, approach, especially when the characters are created from conventional theatrical templates. One of them, the son, is so weakly drawn he might really be a life-size cardboard cut-out on a long metal rod.Much of the drama is provided by people accusing each other of being a witch - this happens every ten minutes or so (the Danish word hex lends itself to melodramatic effect). Other than that, tension is provided, as in Ordet, by someone walking into or out of a room, quite slowly. The dialogue is turgid and stilted, and when it tries to be interesting only sounds like bad poetry being delivered in someone's sleep. There is no subtlety, only direct statement. Whatever the character thinks or feels, it's written on their face and they stand there and say it. The old woman is afraid to die so she says: "I'm terribly afraid to die". They stare fixedly into space while delivering their lines - a cheap method borrowed from amateur stage dramatics – but Dreyer obviously thinks this is the way to do "intense". The real problem is he's not telling us anything about the world. Just plugging away at a single idea or emotion like a bad primary school teacher trying to get the kids' attention, constantly preaching and patronising, thinking that gravity is the surest method. And there's even something sinister at work in Dreyer's method. He is sucking life out of the characters like a malicious vampire, bringing them down to an autistic level that suits his own morose, silent, morbid personality. It's no coincidence that they are made to move around like zombies – that's what he wants to create, half-dead people, morally restricted in every way, and even physically constrained by their stiff costumes. He doesn't want people to express themselves freely because he can't do so himself. It betrays a certain malice towards humanity (particularly a hint of misogyny) that must be vengeance for his own character defects. Bergman engages with real life, and his characters are intensely alive; Dreyer, who can't deal with ordinary emotions, hides from real life and turns his characters into wood. One assumes the main theme – vindictive stigmatisation by society – is personal for him, and all this allows one to make certain assumptions about Dreyer's private life without even looking into it. On the positive side, the lighting was something to appreciate – done with real artistry – and the visuals in general were impressive and atmospheric (except when he was deliberately copying one Rembrandt or other). But as soon as people started to move and speak, it's amateur dramatics night at Jutland parish hall. They should have thrown the whole lot of them on the bonfire.

Talk about a haunting movie, and not just in the awful beauty of the compositions; I'm talking about the whole vision. I have spent days grappling with it. Holding out hope for humanity under the bleakest possible circumstances, this fifteenth-century witch hunt story doesn't just flip the good-evil paradigm. The victims of the witch hunt have their own superstitions, their own petty indulgences and murderous impulses; the perpetrators have their own moral agonies. This is a movie about the individual's struggle against a corrupt society where the individual loses: deadly grim, it shows exactly how f*cked-up things can get, and doesn't provide any easy answers about how to get out from under it, except crucially to assert that it can't be done alone. But the agonizingly tragic sense of loss and corruption - of youth, of love, of freedom - can only come, I think, from a deep belief that a better world is possible. If you hate Ingmar Bergman, you probably will not get this, yet another dour and glacial Scandinavian narrative of yet another dark night of the soul. But the mood is not just a mannerism, and the craft is so brilliant that I for one was able to overcome all my biases and get totally swept away in it, overwhelmed. Dreyer really, really knows what he's doing.