Carl Theodor Dreyer

(Criterion Streaming, November 2019) There are movies out there—many movies out there—that are critically acclaimed to the stratosphere, acclaimed as some of the greatest movies ever made, oft mentioned on extended best-of lists and basically untouchable if you want to keep showing up unharmed at movie reviewers’ secret conferences. (I kid—If there were such conferences, no two critics could agree on what to order for lunch, let along drafting a film canon.)  But when shown to any ordinary person, the film will produce a very different response: a muted sigh out of a duty completed, a checkmark on a list, a resigned sigh of satisfaction that we can go back to more entertaining fare, and the satisfaction that the film will never need to be revisited. So it is with writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, a slow-paced witchcraft romance that plays as an allegory of life under totalitarianism at a time when Dreyer was working in a Nazi-occupied country. It’s clearly made with high ambitions and high competence—but you have the time to fall asleep three times before the credits roll. Pacing is not the sole issue here—monotonous pacing with humourless writing add to the heavy atmosphere of a historical drama in oppressive times. Amusingly, the initial reaction to the film was a lot like mine—accusations of a slow boring film. Later appreciations were far more positive. But I’m sticking to my guns on this one—saw it once, don’t need to see it again.

(On Cable TV, July 2019) For all its qualities, Vampyr is best recommended to those who have already seen Dracula and Nosferatu among the early vampire films, because it strikes out in a direction of its own that remains remarkable (if not completely satisfying) even to modern audiences. Going for eeriness rather than more straightforward horrific qualities, writer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer, fresh off the success of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, decided to mash up a few vampire-themed short stories and to deliver something not yet seen in cinema. After equipping his camera with gauze for a soft-lens look that almost looks like a restoration error today, Dreyer shot a story that takes off from Stoker’s classic tale (what with a young man coming to a small town and a woman lying in a coma after being bitten) to deliver something far stranger than a straight-ahead vampire-fighting film. Primitive but still-effective camera tricks are used to present shadows without figures, events happening backwards and villagers behaving strangely. It doesn’t quite work for modern audiences—the deliberate lack of narrative clarity is annoying, and the stylistic quirks of the film can be difficult to distinguish from early-1930s cinematic amateurishness. Still, those very quirks are also what makes the film worth a look for fans of the subgenre—it’s clearly a forebear of more arthouse horror movie sensibilities. Very much executed in the manner of a silent film despite having a synchronized soundtrack, Vampyr is thankfully short at no more than 75 minutes—at that length, it’s worth a quick look just to see the difference with other classic vampire movies.