Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

VAMPYR

Carl Theodor Dreyer Germany, 1932
In cinema, the possibility of horror is more unnerving than its actualization, particularly if a filmmaker is able to dramatize the precise moment when the banal becomes uncanny. In 1932's Vampyr, Carl Theodor Dreyer draws such a transition out, in ebbs and flows, over the course of the film's running time. Adverse to makeup and other overtly specialized effects, Dreyer often forces us to scrutinize an image for its subtle notes of wrongness.
October 5, 2017
Read full article
The [sparse dialogue] makes the lines cling to you all the more, even as they're subservient to the visuals. Dreyer, a former writer of title cards himself, lets those and the shots of the book gifted Allan by the old man (Die Seltsame Geschichte Der Vampyr by Paul Bonnat) do the bulk of the storytelling work, freeing him and Maté to play with movement, light and shadows.
October 30, 2016
The richness of Rudolph Maté's black-and-white cinematography and the poetry of Dreyer's craft makes the film's treatment of death transcendent, though it remains firmly gripped by the fear of the unknown.
October 29, 2015
When the pull of mortality is imprinted on every frame, nothing less than the most uncanny camerawork will do: A tangible slipperiness suffuses the screen, dollying and panning that distend and dissolve space, a symphony of figures gliding in and out of rooms, up and down staircases.
October 27, 2014
Dreyer takes what so many others have played for cheap horror and crafts a deeply unsettling cinematic nightmare. Vampyr operates on its own strange logic, and uses every trick in the book to keep its audience constantly off balance. Eight decades later, it's as haunting as ever, with only a handful of other films (Hour of the Wolf, Dementia, Begotten) even approaching its ghastly power.
September 24, 2014
A film whose nature is so disembodying that during the production the director himself asked crew members "Who am I? Who am I?" Tasked to give a brief presentation on the film to the class, we opted to employ video essay techniques to enable us to probe the film in as concrete terms as possible in order to grasp how it yields its uncanny effects.
March 19, 2013
Dreyer's first sound film benefits greatly from silent film visual language—iris shots, double exposures, expressionistic lighting, claustrophobic set design, and a fluid, incredibly mobile use of camera movement. Somehow it is an entirely graceful film and languid. It feels not like a film of a dream, but a film which _is_ a dream.
September 26, 2008
The bridge between Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Vampyr is Dreyer's most radical film—maybe one of my dozen favorite movies by any director. It's also a movie that, as an early talkie, was made in three different versions and has long languished in the public domain. Newly reissued in a deluxe package that includes the J. Sheridan Le Fanu novella on which it was based, the Criterion edition offers the restored German version—more complete and looking better than I've ever seen it.
August 27, 2008
Using fractured, often mismatched cuts, and a transection of the space between shadow and light to create an atmosphere of imbalance and dislocation, Dreyer also suggests shifting points of view and an inconcreteness of place that reinforce the viewer's consciousness of the film's construction and permeable logic (an ambiguity that is also signified by the hero's surname).
August 20, 2008
Dreyer takes one crucial scene—in which the female victim of a vampire half transforms and is almost overcome with bloodlust but unable to go through with biting the hero. It is Dreyer, however, who highlights the erotic as well as the terrifying aspect of this scene—thus founding an entire subgenre of vampire movie, in which the kiss of the vampire is a tantalizing promise as much as a disease-ridden threat.
July 21, 2008
It is a different kind of poetic sublime [from Ordet]. But with vampires, too, it is the pathos of immortality that moves us most, when we admit to being moved—the restlessness of their undead souls, the sadness of their longing to be done with it all, even as they feed on the blood of live mortals.
July 21, 2008
An ambiguous, cryptic, and at times mind-boggling hybrid of German Expressionist motifs and early horror film conventions, this eccentric film offers an original, and many would say unique cinematic perspective on the psychology of terror and the elusiveness of clarity, both existential and empirical.
May 19, 2008