A strange follow-up to a monumental work like The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s slow, somber entry in the vampire genre. Not that great art can’t be made from horror material, but Vampyr feels quotidian, compared to both Joan and the horror landmarks. The baron who funded the film, Nicolas de Gunzburg, stars as Allan Grey, a student of the occult investigating strange occurrences in a French village. If nothing else, de Gunzburg (who is credited as Julian West) has enormous, buggy eyes—all the better to bulge at the movie’s many eerie images, set amidst foggy landscapes and dim interiors: a reflection in the water of someone hopping alongside a river, even though the riverbank is empty of any such figure; a boatman holding a giant scythe; shadows of figures on a wall, with no one to cast them. It’s all effective, if uninspired. Vampyr only truly distinguishes itself during a sequence in which the disembodied spirit of Allan Grey lies in a coffin and a lid is placed over him, with a small square window above his face. Dreyer’s camera then switches to Grey’s POV as the coffin is carried away, a claustrophobic shot of a limited horizon passing by with snippets of buildings, trees, life. The movie turns not so much on a fear of vampires (the vampire here takes the form of an old woman whom we barely see), but fear of mortality—or worse, being stuck in some in-between place.
(11/21/2024)
