In the years following his death in 1968, an aura of militant Christianity surrounded the reputation of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his late masterpiece Ordet was central to this mystique. First released 70 years ago in January 1955, the film centers on the rivalry between two Christian factions – the Grundtwig followers (or “happy Christians,” as Dreyer called them) and the strict Inner Mission followers (“the sour-faced ones”). slow in pace and sepulchral tone, the film was adapted from the work of a Lutheran minister, and presented as a stylistic experiment for Dreyer’s unrealized film about the life of Jesus.
But approaching Dreyer’s work in this way has led to misconceptions. Dreyer may have been a Christian, but he was silent, if not evasive, when asked about his relationship to religion. Moreover, many of his films – including Ordette – are highly critical of organized religion: see, for example, the way the Church subjugates women in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and The Day of Wrath (1943). Finally, and most importantly, Dreyer’s human concerns always take precedence: even when portraying a saint in Joan of Arc, he highlights the personal rather than the religious aspects. It was Joan’s human suffering that interested him.
Dreyer often spoke of the need to focus on the “inner” lives of his characters, to reproduce their thoughts and emotions as faithfully as possible. To achieve this, he used “abstraction,” a stylistic simplification that returns elements to their basic functions: for example, he would fill a set with objects and then remove anything he deemed unnecessary, leaving only the elements that he believed “psychologically attested to the character of the resident.”
For Dreyer, this technique allowed him to move away from naturalism toward a more pure and spiritual essence—a way of manifesting the divine nature in the ordinary world. In other words, by grounding his characters’ spiritual struggles within a “realistic” framework guided by human feelings, Dreyer proposed a concept of spirituality that transcended the religious: a synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical that he called “realized mysticism.” .
So, in this light, Dreyer’s films are best understood as humanist tales of individual spirituality, rather than as works of collective religiosity – and nowhere is this more apparent than in Ordet’s film.
A multi-character study, the film focuses on the inhabitants of Borgensgård, a house in western Jutland belonging to Morten Borgen, the leader of the Happy Christians, and his three sons: Mikkel, happily married and free of religious belief; Johannes, lost to madness and believing himself to be Jesus; And young Anders, who falls in love with the daughter of Peter the Tailor, the leader of the interior mission.
By following these intertwined characters, plenty of space is given to the rivalry between the two Christian sects, but the film ultimately criticizes both – and shows everyone, including the local priest, as lacking in true faith. If in the previous films Dreyer showed evil at work through powerful antagonists, by Ordet’s time hostility had become a general ill, a society corrupted by a lack of sincerity. Only madman Johannes and Mikkel’s young daughter seem to have any strength behind their convictions. As Dreyer said: “The best believers are the child and the deranged, since their minds are not as rational and limited by established facts as ours.”
As always, Dreyer treats all his characters with sympathy, but in Anders’ story, it is clear that his sympathy lies with the young lovers: certainly a difference in religious views is no reason to separate people who communicate on a level beyond the spiritual. In the physical realm? Because, as Dreyer shows repeatedly throughout his work, to be human is also to be a body—whether it is Joan’s burning flesh at the pyre, or the body behind the sensual sexuality of an illicit affair in Day of Wrath.
In Ordet, Miquel is quick to remind us that he loves his wife’s body as much as her soul, and while the film may end on a note of grace, he does so only after one of the fattest, most lustful kisses ever captured on screen. What is God if not love, physical or otherwise?
So Ordet, like much of Dreyer’s work, shows us the body that surrounds our bones and the spirit that lies within us. It is a supreme achievement in spiritual cinema, and yet it remains completely grounded, eschewing religiosity in favor of emphasizing pure individual faith – whether in God or the human body. In doing so, it leads us towards a supernatural sublimity unlike anything else in the history of cinema.