DAY OF WRATH aka VREDENS DAG
Year: 1943
UK: BFI (Access)
Cast: Thorkild Roose, Lisbeth Movin, Sigrid Neiiendam, Preben Lerdorff, Anna Svierkier, Albert Høeberg, Olaf Ussing, Kirsten Andreasen, Sigurd Berg, Harald Holst, Emanuel Jørgensen, Sophie Knudsen, Preben Neergaard, Emilie Nielsen, Hans Christian Sørensen, Dagmar Wildenbruck
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Country: Denmark
Language: Danish (English subtitles)
UK: 100 mins
UK Certificate: PG contains implied torture, witch burning, and mild language
UK Release Date: 6 June 2003 (Limited Release - London)
Synopsis
DAY OF WRATH is a stark drama of love and witchcraft in the 17th century. It marked Carl Dreyer's return to directing in the midst of World War II after a barely explained hiatus of 11 years since he made the haunting VAMPYR. Demonstrating that he had lost none of his powers of precision or uncompromising rigour as a film-maker, it became the first in the trilogy of late, great masterpieces with which Dreyer ended his career.
Inevitably seen as an allegory of Nazi occupation, DAY OF WRATH is set in a Danish village in 1623 against a background of fear, superstition, betrayal and religious cruelty. Anne, a young woman who has married an elderly preacher responsible for sending an old peasant woman to the stake, falls in love with his son and wishes her husband dead. When he obliges, she is accused by her mother-in-law of witchcraft and condemned to be burnt... Dreyer's persistent theme of women suffering sacrificially at the hands of malicious and sanctimonious men is writ large in DAY OF WRATH, whilst his austerely beautiful compositions, camera movements and instrumental close-ups reach perfection in a film of unparalleled visual brilliance and profound emotion.
Carl Theodor Dreyer made only 14 feature films, but they are among the most intensely wrought works in the history of the cinema. Spanning the silent era to sound, from 1918 to 1964, Dreyer is one of those filmmakers whose work is now more talked about than seen. A new restored print of DAY OF WRATH will be screened.
