How to Make a Masterpiece by Torturing Your Lead Actress and Building a Castle You Don’t Even Show
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently weeping uncontrollably because a French peasant girl from 1431 just gave me the most intense silent eye contact of my entire life.
Welcome, my friends, to the beautiful, agonizing, and deeply unhinged world of Carl Theodor Dreyer.
If you’ve never heard of Dreyer, congratulations: your emotional stability is still intact. For the uninitiated, this Danish director is a legend, but his filmmaking method for this movie was pure, unfiltered madness:
- Spend a massive fortune building a gigantic, historically accurate medieval castle set in France.
- Shoot 98% of the movie in extreme, suffocating close-ups of people’s faces, completely ignoring the expensive castle.
- Ban all makeup, use weird lighting to make your actors look like grotesque goblins, and allegedly make your lead actress kneel on sharp, cold stones for hours just to capture real, unsimulated agony.
The result? The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
There is a 19-year-old girl named Joan (played by Maria Falconetti, who was actually 35 at the time, but who’s counting?). She claims she talks to God. A tribunal of terrifyingly bald, corrupt priests in bowl cuts wants her to admit she’s actually talking to the devil.
That is literally the entire movie. There are no epic battles, no horse chases, and no CGI. It is just two hours of intense, silent cross-examination. It’s basically the medieval equivalent of getting interrogated by the tax office, except the penalty is being burned at the stake.
But the sheer energy of this movie is insane. Dreyer cuts between faces so fast and from such weird, crooked angles that it feels like a psychological horror movie. It is silent, but the screaming of the actors’ eyes is louder than a heavy metal concert.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Faces: Dreyer’s ban on makeup means you see every sweat drop, every massive wrinkle, and every ugly wart on the priests’ faces. They look like a collection of medieval gargoyles. Meanwhile, Falconetti looks like an angel whose soul is actively being shredded.
- Antonin Artaud’s Cheekbones: The legendary avant-garde theater madman Antonin Artaud plays a sympathetic monk, and he looks so intensely gothic and handsome he could walk straight onto a Balenciaga runway today.
- The Madhouse Miracle: The original, uncensored cut of this film literally burned down, and Dreyer died thinking his masterpiece was lost forever. Then, in 1981, a pristine, uncut copy was found in—I am not making this up—a janitor’s closet of a Norwegian insane asylum. If that isn’t a sign from God to watch this, I don’t know what is.
The Verdict
Is it a fun Friday night watch? God, no. It will hollow you out like a pumpkin on Halloween. But is it one of the greatest pieces of art ever captured on film? Absolutely. Falconetti’s performance is so legendary she literally never made another major movie again. She put her entire life force into this and then just retired. Respect.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 buckets of tears shed by a French peasant girl.
Wanna ruin your mood but elevate your soul?
Dim the lights, turn off your phone, and watch this absolute masterpiece for free on YouTube (since it’s legally in the public domain and belongs to the world now):
[WATCH “THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
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