“It has been said that Carl Dreyer's art begins to unfold just at the point where most other directors give up. Witchcraft and martyrdom are his themes - but his witches do not ride broomsticks; they ride the erotic fears of their persecutors. In Day Of Wrath, as in his earlier The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, he carries the heroine to the limits of human feeling, to the extremes of isolation, fear, and torment. In 1623 the young second wife of an austere pastor desires his death because of her love for his son; when the pastor falls dead, she is tried as a witch. As the girl is trapped, and as all possibility of hope is stripped away, one's identification with her fear becomes unbearable; then Dreyer dissolves our terror as we see that the individual is now laid bare, purified beyond even fear. It is a world that suggests a dreadful fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka: the young wife becomes what she and the others believe a witch to be. This psychological masterpiece is the expression of a single personality, built up from Dreyer's script, choice of camera angles, editing, and his control of every nuance of performance; it is one of the most complexly moving films ever made.”