Made by Dreyer during a Norwegian summer, The Bride of Glomdale concerns the love of a poor farmer's son for the daughter of a neighboring wealthy farmer. If the melodrama is Griffith-like on its surface, it is Dreyer-like in its density of emotion, in telling of "the central couple's insufficiently socialized desire in the face of an excessively repressive patriarchy...The families are symbolically separated by a river which, as usual in Dreyer, is a setting for the mise-en-scène of desire, including a final bravura struggle against its current" (Mark Nash, Dreyer, BFI). The film exists only in this incomplete version, which is enough, however, to understand the story.