General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Day of Wrath

Day of Wrath (Danish: Vredens dag) is a 1943 Danish black-and-white drama directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, about a young woman accused of witchcraft in a seventeenth-century Danish village. It was filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and Danish audiences received it as an allegory of the occupation, although Dreyer denied that it was made with reference to the Nazis.¹^•² The film was Dreyer's first feature in more than ten years, following Vampyr (1932), and it is now counted among his major works alongside Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964).³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and year	Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1943; Danish premiere 13 November 1943⁴
Source	The play Anne Pedersdotter by Hans Wiers-Jenssens (1908), based on real sixteenth-century events in Bergen, Norway⁵
Setting	A Danish village in 1623, during the witch hunts⁶
Principal cast	Thorkild Roose (Absalon Pederssøn), Lisbeth Movin (Anne), Sigrid Neiiendam (Merete), Preben Lerdorff Rye (Martin), Anna Svierkier (Herlofs Marte)¹
Key crew	Cinematography Karl Andersson; music Poul Schierbeck; editing Edith Schlüssel and Anne Marie Petersen; production A/S Palladium, producer Tage Nielsen⁴
Format	Black and white, Danish language; runtimes of 97 minutes (Criterion) and 100 minutes (mk2) appear in current catalogs¹^•⁶
Later recognition	London premiere 23 November 1946, the first Danish sound film shown there; not nominated for an Academy Award in 1949⁴^•¹¹

Spoilers

Plot and source

The story is set in 1623, in a Danish village living under a harsh religious orthodoxy in which suspected witches are condemned and burned. Pastor Absalon Pederssøn lives with his elderly mother Merete and his much younger second wife, Anne, who knows nothing of her origins and has never experienced love.⁶ The film opens with the old herb woman Herlofs Marte, accused of witchcraft, seeking refuge in the rectory; Anne hesitates to hide her, and Marte is found and taken away, later burned at the stake.⁴^•⁷

The fatal entanglement. Almost simultaneously, Absalon's son Martin returns home from his first marriage, and he and Anne fall in love.⁶ Marte had threatened to reveal that Absalon once saved Anne's mother, herself accused of witchcraft, because of his interest in the young Anne.⁷ When Absalon learns of the affair, he dies of a heart attack; Martin deserts Anne, and the villagers accuse her of having used witchcraft to cause his death and to ensnare her lover, a charge that condemns her to be burned.⁵

The screenplay by Dreyer, Mogens Skot-Hansen, and Poul Knudsen adapts the play Anne Pedersdotter by Hans Wiers-Jenssens, which the Turner Classic Movies profile traces to real events in sixteenth-century Bergen, Norway.⁵ The title comes from the medieval hymn Dies irae, the sequence of the Latin Requiem Mass about the day of judgment.⁸

Production

Day of Wrath was Dreyer's first feature in over ten years. After Vampyr (1932) was poorly received in his own country, projects he initiated in France, England, and even Somalia fell through, and he returned to journalism before the prospect of filming Anne Pedersdotter brought him back to filmmaking.³^•⁵ The film was produced by the Danish company Palladium, with Tage Nielsen as producer.⁴

Casting and performance. Dreyer cast Lisbeth Movin, then a relatively unknown stage and screen actress, as Anne because he "fell in love with her eyes"; her performance has been compared in intensity to Falconetti's in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).⁵ Anna Svierkier, who played Herlofs Marte, was nearly eighty years old at the time and was put through an arduous physical ordeal for the role.⁵

Wartime context and reception

The film premiered in Denmark on 13 November 1943, late in the year during what the Harvard Film Archive program notes call the blackest period of the Nazi occupation, and Danish audiences saw it as an allegory for the German occupation.⁴^•² Dreyer himself claimed the film was not made explicitly in reference to the Nazis, but critics have read its story of persecution, torture, and enforced morality as a parallel to the occupation, during which Jews in Denmark were targeted, deported, or captured.⁹^•⁷

The film's reception at home was poor: according to the TCM profile, Danish critics received it even worse than they had received Vampyr, and it was released at a time when wartime conditions severely limited theatrical distribution.⁵ Its standing recovered over time. It premiered in London on 23 November 1946 as the first Danish sound film shown there, was not nominated for an Academy Award in 1949, and entered the Criterion Collection as spine #125.⁴^•¹^•¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100% Tomatometer rating from 26 reviews.⁹

Style and place in Dreyer's work

Dreyer made only four features after Vampyr, and three of them, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud, form a late-career run in which he refined a style of long takes, deliberate movement, severe compositions, and spare dialogue.⁸ Karl Andersson's cinematography draws on Dutch Golden Age painting, a comparison nearly every writer on the film makes, with faces lit in candlelight against deep blacks.⁸^•⁹ The film's slowness is part of its method: characters move and speak with a formal, stagey precision, and the film never shows supernatural events directly, so that small disturbances, a gust of wind or a guttering candle, carry the weight of omens.¹⁰^•⁸

Thematically, the film examines religious orthodoxy as a source of fear and inter-family strife, and it dramatizes how an accusation alone can destroy a woman, without a single speech about it.⁸ Dreyer's spare, spiritually focused approach has been described as echoed in the films of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Lars von Trier.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026