|Ryan Sanderson|
Day of Wrath plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, October 2 to Sunday, October 4. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I’ve loved (or at least enjoyed) most of the films I’ve written about in the six years I’ve been aware of Perisphere, but every now and again, we show one of my personal favorite films. You know the ones. The select group—some film nerds have them, others are liars—that I not only enjoy and appreciate, but consider personal benchmarks, films that elevated my understanding of the medium and, in extreme cases, myself as a human being.
Day of Wrath is one such film. That’s not, strictly speaking, a recommendation.
I’ve been an enormous fan of movies for more than three decades. In that time, I’ve met the medium from the perspectives of many different people. And about sixteen years and two months ago, one of those people was serious to an off-putting degree and also experiencing a crisis of faith. That incarnation of Ryan met the filmography of Carl Theodor Dreyer as a fish meets a small but incredibly varied ocean.
It began on overnight shifts in downtown Des Moines, watching The Passion of Joan of Arc on an eight-inch portable DVD player in the back of my car. Imagine you are one of my college friends, getting a text around three or four in the morning: “OH MY GOD! I JUST SAW THE MOST INCREDIBLE FILM! THE CAMERAWORK! THE SETS! THE THEMES ABOUT THE INDOMITABLE HUMAN SOUL CRUSHED UNDER INSTITUTIONAL CORRUPTION AND SOCIETAL IGNORANCE! I’M SHAKING. LITERALLY SHAKING.” [This is a paraphrase. I promise the original was far more obnoxious.]
Weeks pass. I dive into Dreyer’s films headfirst. Vampyr (1931) is bursting with all the creative potential of early cinema. Ordet (1955) is infuriating, but in a way I still can’t stop thinking about. And then you have Day of Wrath (1943)—stone-serious, slow-as-mud, formal, brutal, shot under Nazi occupation, and still probably the film I think about when I consider how to layer subtext through narrative storytelling.
People in Day of Wrath move an average of two miles per hour. They speak in socially mandated, uniform monotone (aside from the handful of moments when they scream like animals). Every movement, every gesture is precise in a kind of stagey way that can be off-putting in films of that era but which in this case never fails to devastate me. The film was shot in 1943, adapted from a play written in 1909 about events that occurred in the sixteenth century (it’s set in 1623), but even so, it still feels urgent and alive in 2026.
And it all comes down to witchcraft.
I don’t think the filmmakers of Day of Wrath believe in supernatural power. I don’t think their film does either. But every character in the story—with the possible exception of the one person killed onscreen for being a witch—does believe in witchcraft. And the movie exists within their subjectivity. So events that occur within the film are occasionally translated by the characters and camera as occurring via supernatural means. And it begs the question—what is the difference between a universally accepted falsehood and the truth? What awarenesses have people cultivated to distinguish between these things? What sorts of events cause shared realities to splinter? What motives inform the stories people tell themselves about their own actions versus the actions of others?
The specific biases of Day of Wrath are somewhat removed from present-day concerns (though not as much as you’d hope), but the real brilliance, what makes it one of the most effective stage dramas ever filmed, is how it dramatizes the shape of those differences, the distances between people, and the idiosyncratic ways they navigate those differences.
For example, Anne Pedersdotter (Lisbeth Movin) is the young second wife to governing patriarch Reverend Absalon Pederssøn (Thorkild Roose). She discovers that her late mother confessed to witchcraft, and decides to try it out for herself. She casts a spell to seduce her son-in-law (who is actually her elder, given the age gap between her and her husband). Lo and behold, he appears. She curses her small-minded, anxious husband, and he suffers a dramatic fit. She believes it’s witchcraft, but the audience is left to wonder—aren’t there more reasonable explanations for these men’s behavior? She has been taught through the oppressive gaze of everyone around her to consider everything done to her as though it’s her own fault. And when things go wrong, it makes her an easy scapegoat for people who don’t want to face the consequences of their own actions.
Every character in the film is framed this way—not from some authoritative external gaze, but through the lens of their own subjectivity. While this is something a lot of good films do, I think Dreyer in particular is very good at it—drawing shapes around different kinds of subjectivity. And there are so many subjective differences between this film’s characters. They are separated by age, sex, and disposition, by social status, by their relationship to societal violence, by the fierceness of the light in their eyes. The film’s most intense moments occur when these divided characters, forced by their repressed society to behave as identically to one another as possible, briefly encounter the true distance between one another.
Dreyer always disputed that Day of Wrath was a response to the Nazis. He’d been trying to make it long before they arrived. However, I just can’t imagine that this film about oppressive social structures and sanctioned violence wasn’t at least somewhat a reaction to the murderous dictatorship in charge. Just like I can’t imagine the film’s hazy subjectivity wasn’t an earnest effort to get radical ideas past fascist censors. There’s a long history of films made in response to Nazi occupation, and it’s a subject worth studying. I don’t have time for it here, except to say—this is a film about authoritarianism, not just the public executions but the household conversations, the moment-by-moment juxtaposition of cool, detached voices and screams, the galling disparity between crimes that go acknowledged and unacknowledged, the voices that cannot be spoken and the voices that everyone is forced to adopt. It all lingers on the screen, daring you not to notice it, just as the characters on screen try not to notice it. But you can’t. And I think that’s also part of the film’s point.
I can’t find the direct quote, but I recall someone online saying Anya Taylor Joy always seems out of place in period pieces because “some faces have simply seen the internet.” And while the internet didn’t exist in 1946, I think you could say something similar about Lisbeth Movin as Anne (some faces have simply seen… Bing Crosby? Original run Batman?). It’s not an accident. In a sea of languid, downcast faces, her bright and curious eyes draw notice and distrust from all around her. Both Absalon and Martin are drawn to those eyes, perhaps fetishize them, but cannot survive the severity of their gaze. You sense one reason the older generation in this community so oppressively monitors the youth is that they’re terrified of what the youth see in them. In Absalon’s case, it literally kills him. Or maybe he dies from witchcraft. Who can say?
The best scene in the film involves all the characters killing time in the living room. Anne is sewing. Martin is pretending to read. Their incestuous romance is carried between their eyes through the threads of Anne’s design. Absalon joins them, wanting to be part of their joke. But he cannot see that their laughter is an escape from him and his oppressive piety, that it comes from a wildness he cannot comprehend and would be horrified of if he could. It’s such a succinct example of how puritanism makes enemies of the young, who must then either betray themselves or the world around them. I relate to a lot of that. I still see myself reflected in it, though not as much as I did fifteen years ago. I suspect Dreyer has more sympathy for Absalon than I do currently, but who knows. Maybe when I watch the film again in fifteen more years, I’ll see it more fully through his subjectivity. I hope not.
Edited by Finn Odum