An incandescent self-exploration: Ambiguities and unconscious logic in Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark 1943).
The International journal of psycho-analysis October 1, 2021 Cesare Secchi
Using Ignacio Matte Blanco's theoretical model, the author analyzes the paradoxical dramatic dynamics in Carl Theodor Dreyer's film as a tormented path of self-awareness involving progressive immersion in the unconscious. The protagonist Anne, a young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, falls in love with her son-in-law and comes to believe she possesses the magical powers of witches: evoking the living and dead, killing with thought, and communicating through dreams. All emotions reach an infinite level of intensity. After being abandoned by her lover and her husband's death, Anne confesses to witchcraft before his coffin, attaining a mystic epiphany—possibly contact with the mind's deepest layer where symmetrization is total.