Hosannas from James Agee and Archer Winsten could not milk more than one art-house week for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath/Vredens Dag in April 1948. The Museum of Modern Art is now offering the 1943 must-see, and although the theater was crowded, the audience was not young. Three 1:30 weekdays limits those free to come, and both theme and appropriately deliberate pacing simply, and sorely, hold little appeal for many of today’s movement-hungry moviegoers.

The story is co-adapted by the director/co-producer from Wiers-Jenssens’ stageplay Anne Pedersdotter and titled after Dies Irae, the thirteenth-century Latin hymn on Judgement Day, but its theme has not found consensus among commentators. Some see an allegory of Nazi occupation of the Dane’s homeland, others a criticism of repression and intolerance or related hypocrisy, or man’s law as opposed to that of nature, along with the filmmaker’s insistent juxtaposition of fear and love. In the end, this masterwork is as modern as Euripides, timeless as O’Neill and Arthur Miller, militant as Friedan or Steinem, and empathetically devastating as Hawthorne: sin and guilt fester when women’s spontaneity, and woman herself, is suppressed in the name of deity, social order, and “life [that] must be secretive to survive.”

A flop in 1932, Vampyr ended Dreyer’s cinema activity for a decade and more, one reason that this “difficult . . . unprofitable” auteur completed only five sound features. That beautiful dream-trance of shadows on overexposed backgrounds is reversed in DW, where Karl Andersson and Henning Bendtsen’s long takes and symmetrically photographed interiors are dominant in gloom (against occasional gauzy autumnal fields) and pious Dutch-masters burghers are unrelieved in black. Arresting visuals highlight individuals’ faces and were an influence on Bergman, another Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran product, as well as on Mexican Reygadas.

In 1623, when witches are hunted, tortured and burned, elderly herbalist Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier) begs for a hiding place with Anne (Lisbeth Movin), whose mother she had helped in similar circumstances and who is now the wife of the much older Reverend Absalom Pederson (Thorkild Roose). Apprehended in the loft, the doomed woman fears death while scorning Heaven and Hell, but rack and red-hot pincers harrow all-male witnesses more than her; refusing to confess, she wants reprieve through the Reverend, whom she sotto voce accuses of letting Anne’s mother die as a witch that he might marry the underage daughter.

The woman’s rants will haunt the living in this world permeated with, and directed towards, Death: namely, that Satan’s minions can summon up the Quick and the Dead and, by wishing it, cause someone’s death.

Absalom is as good as he should be for his era and solicitous about his young wife but had not considered the injury to her in a loveless, necessarily childless marriage. His welfare is jealously guarded by his own mother, Merete (Sigrid Neiiendam), for whom he is the only important being and who lives with them and does not dislike, but implacably hates, her daughter-in-law.

SPOILER ALERT

The Quick called up, Absalom’s son by a first marriage, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), returns after an extended absence, lights up the unhappy wife’s world and, indeed, her very physical appearance and a “flame” in her eyes, is innocently but not unwillingly seduced by her, and at last proves disappointingly unfaithful and traditional.

Her sexual self liberated, Anne is by turns kittenish, possessive, sensual, scheming, and pathetic. Aware what they were about, Italian distributors preferred the title The Lover of His Mother, on the face of it in reference to the reverend and his uncharitable witch of a mother but at once a not-so-veiled hint of the son and his stepmother.

Aged, weak, despondent, the Man of God returns in a storm from the sudden deathbed of inquisitor Laurentius (Olaf Ussing) and once home is struck by Anne’s laughter and proud assertion of the affaire, at which he trembles and drops dead. Witch Marthe had cursed Laurentius; and offspring-of-a-witch Anne had wished Absalom dead and out of the lovers’ way.

The screen neither affirms not denies any causal connection but remains true to its concern, not with the community’s obsession with physical death, but rather with the lifelessness consequent on denial of heart, spirit and woman’s sexuality. Guilt is as much individual as communal: who, indeed, shall scape whipping?

(Released by Janus Films; not rated by MPAA.)