Made some 11 years after Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's previous film, "Vampyr", "Day of Wrath" was shot during the Nazi occupation of Denmark during World War Two.
Inevitably critics have drawn connections between this period and the film's subject matter of forced confessions and killings perpetrated by the authorities.
Yet alongside this element of political allegory (which Dreyer denied, incidentally), it's also a compelling family melodrama and a sombre exploration of how men co-opt religious dogma to oppress and punish female desires.
The setting is a Danish village in the 1620s, where an elderly pastor (Thorkild Roose) has been cursed by an old lady accused of witchcraft, whom he helped condemn to death at the stake.
The pastor has taken the beautiful young Anne (Lisbeth Movin), as his second wife, yet their marriage is loveless and childless. The bride also feels victimized by her domineering and possessive mother-in-law, who lives with the couple in the vicarage.
when the pastor's grown-up son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), comes to stay, Anne finds herself falling for her step-sibling and wishing that her husband were dead...
Adapted from Hans Wiers-Jenssens' novel, "Day of Wrath" eloquently illustrates Dreyer's masterful command of the cinematic medium, with the film's emotional intensity magnified by the pared-down visual style.
Like Robert Bresson, Dreyer is a filmmaker who focuses his attentions on the physical and the material in order to suggest the spiritual, hence the telling close-ups on faces.
Shot, lit, and composed with a stark precision, "Day of Wrath" is also notable for the poignantly restrained lead performance of Movin, as the woman whose fleeting happiness is so brutally crushed by a heartlessly intolerant society.
In Danish with English subtitles.
Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) (1943)
