Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 feature Day of Wrath carries all of the director’s hallmarks. It is slow, ponderous and challenging. But for those who manage to get through it, the rewards are immense. Set in Denmark during the 17th century, Day of Wrath offers insights into repression and power. It isn’t for everyone, but along with his iconic Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, confirms Dreyer’s status as a giant of world cinema.
Day of Wrath is inspired by the harrowing experiences of Anne Pedersdotter, a young Norwegian woman accused of witchcraft in the late 1500s. Anne (Lisbeth Movin) lives a rather grim existence. She is married to an old cleric named Absalon Pederssøn Beyer (Thorkild Roose). Beyer’s ancient mother Meret (Sigrid Neiiendam) lives with the couple. A cold, severe woman, Meret loathes Anne and makes her life miserable. Her behavior is hardly justified or even explainable aside from the film’s time and place being intensely religious and misogynistic. The witch hunts of the early modern period are on, you see, zeroing in on any woman deemed undesirable or aberrant.
Dreyer establishes this dark world with austere set design and stark black and white photography. This gives Day of Wrath a cold, rigid air. Mirroring this are the characters. The Beyer household is one of stillness and reserve. Its inhabitants feel burdened, with little warmth, minimal emotion and almost zero joy. All of this is appropriate given the dominance of the church. That said, the film’s beginning scenes are so grim and quiet they are arguably languid. I expect that could pose challenges for viewers, especially in our age of rotted attention spans and endemic dopamine addiction.
The film pulls you back in when it digs into the society’s layers further and exposes its lack of legitimacy. Consider Roose’s Absalon, a man of the cloth and part of the governmental apparatus identifying and prosecuting accused witches. Absalon hardly has unimpeachable religious scruples. Day of Wrath reveals how Anne’s mother was also once accused of witchcraft. Absalon used his power to intervene and get her off in exchange for marrying Anne, who at the time was basically a child.
Absalon could have become a cartoonishly hypocritical figure because of this detail, someone ready to abuse his authority for licentious ends. Dreyer’s script and Roose’s strong performance ensure he instead comes across as recognizable and human, an emblem of our bottomless potential for weakness and rationalization.
Without legitimacy, a society is left with one thing: brute force and power. In an early scene, an old woman named Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) becomes a target of the state. She is arrested for sorcery, tortured and eventually meets the pyre. Dreyer stages her execution with unsparing ferocity. It elicited two gasps in the theater I was in; not bad for a film over 80 years old. His penchant for close-ups, so powerful in The Passion of Joan of Arc, returns here to great effect. The filmmakers repeatedly focus on Marte’s face as she faces oblivion. It’s a harrowing choice that fully emphasizes how scary the punitive machinery of the state can be.
Also integral is the complicity of those who should know better. Neiiendam’s Meret is a great character. Her disapproving glares, irate clucks and endless glowers toward Anne are really funny due to their absurdity. She is a welcome presence in the film not just because she’s a hilarious old battleax. She also serves as an unfortunate reminder for how, in societies like Day of Wrath, those who belong to an oppressed group can at times enable the oppressors.
But no matter how heavy-handed a nation state acts, Dreyer’s great insight is that it is ineffective in stamping out undesired behavior among a population. Lust and sex. Freedom and self-determination. These are all drives that rage within human beings and influence our behavior just as much as reason. And they are all desires that don’t go away no matter how stridently an authority tries to impose dogmatic religion or overly zealous rules.
Anne’s journey in Day of Wrath is case in point. When Absalon’s more age-appropriate son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye) comes into the picture after traveling abroad, Anne takes a shine to the young buck and begins an affair with him. It doesn’t matter that such a transgression won’t just tank her marriage or standing within her household. It doesn’t matter that it may lead to a one-way ticket to the stake. This is something she is going to do, no matter the cost.
Always the shrewd filmmaker, Dreyer artfully showcases this point by juxtaposing the natural and artificial world. When Anne and Martin begin secretly smooching, the film sees them take a boat out on a small river adjacent to the Beyer home. They are almost immediately surrounded by branches and reeds, suggesting that Christian beliefs about dominion over nature is largely a fantasy. While it can try to banish the natural world from human affairs, it remains present on the periphery, ready to reclaim those who step outside society’s boundaries.
Toward the end, Day of Wrath goes even further. Repression, it suggests, is not only ineffective but can be dangerous for both oppressors and oppressed. Dreyer’s script, which he co-wrote along with Poul Knudsen and Mogens Skot-Hansen, lets us see the depths of Anne’s pain and anger at having her childhood stolen from her. Her dynamic journey reflects how living under oppression can curdle those feelings into its own form of wrath. The character’s arc eventually culminates with an explosive denunciation, an act whose consequences threaten to immolate, both figuratively and literally, the lives of all involved.
Anne’s fate is perhaps the clearest example of Day of Wrath‘s position on repressive societies. The film clearly sees that such constrictive worlds can be ironically highly unstable, where harsh rules, laws and mores create the wild passions they seek to prevent. This is especially true if the society attempting to do the controlling is headed by those who can’t abide by their own professed morality and have nothing to rely on but violence and brutality. This is a stunningly powerful message, and one that remains timeless. The film may move at its own pace to make these points, but once it does, you’re reminded how good things come to those who wait.
