Ordet (1955)

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Ordet Movie Review

Ordet is a 1955 Danish drama film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. It is a disappointing film from a usually great director.

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“I believe a lot of little miracles happen secretly.“

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I really liked the plot in Ordet. It is a fascinating examination of religion and the power of spiritual belief. The ending, although definitely out there, was intriguing and ultimately quite powerful. Some of the other scenes such as the famous poster sequence in the fields were also memorable in imagery and quite fascinating.

But it is ultimately just solid and never great mainly because of the pacing. The film is dreadfully slow which troubled me and thus I was rarely engaged in the storyline thoroughly. It takes its time to get there owing to a slow start and the final third, no matter how powerful, still came too late in the game.

The acting is great, but the character development should have been better. They are solidly developed, but not great which they should have been as this is obviously a chamber piece which needs the characters more than anything else.

Although I really disliked its sometimes overly static approach with too much dialogue and not powerful but somewhat not essential and lacking dialogue, I liked a couple of quotes and lines nonetheless and I really liked the visuals here. Whenever the film went out of the house, it was great to watch and quite fascinating. It of course benefits from an interesting take in terms of the cinematography.

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Ordet definitely looked interesting and was superbly shot. It was also really well directed and it was all around great in terms of the technical aspects. However, the script, though definitely sophisticated, was never as well utilized in the execution which felt disappointing and led to a film being more of a visual and interesting than a truly thought-provoking and spiritual experience. That all led to Ordet being a solid, but in the end very disappointing and dull movie. Carl Theodor Dreyer disappointed me here and ‘The Passion of Joan Arc’ and ‘Day of Wrath’ were infinitely better.

Ordet is a solid, but disappointing film. The direction from Carl Theodor Dreyer is expectedly strong, the cinematography is inspired with some of the shots being quite intriguing and the film is clever and very interesting, but because it was so slow paced and lacked focus, it never utilized its premise particularly well and ended up being more of an intriguing than a truly spiritual experience.