Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

ags123 Critics can analyze and defend this film all they want but I challenge any normal person to get through this thing with a straight face. The proper response to all this deadly serious nonsense is to howl at the moon. It gives "art" a bad name. All those two-person conversations where no one looks at each other! The only movement being from one sofa to another! The expressionless faces! The endless talk about work vs. love and whether the twain shall ever meet! Who talks like that? The same theme has been done better (and faster) elsewhere (i.e. "The Red Shoes"). Whatever good intentions went into this film are negated by the mannered execution, so stagy it takes several minutes just for each character to drift in and out of the room. It must be seen to be believed! I'm giving it a couple of stars just for the utter gall of foisting this ponderous yackety-yak on an unsuspecting public.

kijii This was the last of the Danish filmmaker's 13 projects. Gertrud is unlike any other film or movie that I have EVER seen. In fact, it is SO different that it might belong to another genre of visual experience. Dreyer's characters are restrained in emotion and rarely look at each other, since they usually face the camera in very low-action dialogues with very simple set designs. However, I have to admit that, with a little patience, one can get caught up in Dreyer's message. In this film, Gerturd (Nina Pens Rode) explores the effect of free will without compromise. She believes that men, with social ambitions, cannot attain pure personal love. To her, one must choose between these two ideals, since they run counter to each other and one ends up 'killing' the other. Gertrude knows that her husband, Gustav (Bendt Rothe), is pursuing a cabinet minister position. One day, she unemotionally tells him that she is leaving him. He asks her if there is another man. She tells him that there is one but that her lover is unrelated to the reason that she is leaving Gustav. Undaunted, Gustav continues to pursue the matter by asking her about her former love affair with the poet, Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode). She tells him that her love is with a man of 'another class.' We find out that the man is a young composer, Erland (Baard Owe). However, when Gertrude asks Erland if he will run away with her, he refuses. Erland's refusal is wrapped up by his inability to financially support her and his social responsibility to another woman who is carrying his child. Once again, Gertrude runs up against problems that interfere with her ideals of free will and pure love. When she finally re-meets the mentor of her ideal, Gustav, he wants to go away with her. But, this time he is rebuffed because he no longer needs her love. This film is austere and somber. But, it is an interesting experience. It may be the best portrayal of the effect of actually living in the rarefied atmosphere of pure ideals espoused by poets and philosophers. For me, even though free will and love may be one of the highest concepts (in the abstract), they have no meaning unless they are lived and used. With Gertrud, it was not a process but an end in itself. By missing the process, she never finds the real meaning.The irony of the film seems to be that Gertrud—in her never ending search for free will and love--never understands that idealism and realism are mutually exclusive. OR, that she does understand and chooses the former over the later.

chaos-rampant This is stunning work in my estimation but difficult. You will have to work and earn this movie for yourself, deserve it. Enter before you're ready and all you'll see is an empty room. Enter when you have come some way in your travels and you'll see there was not a single thing missing.Modern and staid at the same time, Dreyer straddles both eras, someone who began in the silent era but paved the way for modernity. His Joan of Arc was a woman's passion rending the air around her, soul heaving from a body. Vampyr was dreamlike and floated. His next works quieted the passion, dimmed the seeing. Until we come to this, his very last one.Even more deeply moored in characters, even more placid, even more renouncing of drama. If you simply try to see this as a drama (the way Wrath and Ordet can be seen), you may find the pace stolid, the same lugubrious articulation of feelings tiresome; you might note Gertrud's complete certainty in how she feels and being mildly tired to not find it as complacent. But like Ordet is not a pastor's work, this is not merely a dramatist's, I don't think. It's true, his subjects give off a musty scent, are set in bygone days, but that's with the exception of this one, which is his most modern. So give it space, and it will begin to shine beyond simply these lives that we see.Anchored in a woman and the men in her life as they come together for the occasion and part again, the occasion is that she decides to leave her husband for someone else, this is a prolonged contemplation of life gone. It's not just what these people explain about how they feel but these ruminations being deepened and sculpted in time, how they intersect; these translucent openings to rooms that I find myself in, the gentle dissonance between sense and discovery, the camera coming to and going again.It's all that marvelous sense of inhabiting that room where feelings linger and take shape; for example the flashback to where she visits him in his house and he plays the piano, we don't seem him at first, only the room resplendent in radiant light as if her own soul lights it up and then fills it with song. Later, after she has lied about going to the opera and visits him again, the same room is now submerged in shadows, their hushed love affair far from the eyes of the world. Two sides of Dreyer show through. Characters pouring out their inmosts gave rise to Bergman where it's the spoken word being sculpted; but even greater, the camera that waits and comes to, the way it stays time, shuffles and reveals, this is what Tarkovsky would extend in his own work. If the next step has been taken, and I think that's in a film with the magnitude of Zerkalo, the blueprint is here.We glide through all of this stoically, as if it was always apparent that life wouldn't work out as dreamed so it's no real surprise. The husband frets and fights to keep her, later the poet ex-boyfriend pours his heart to her about the mistake of letting of her go; but the husband knows no words can change how someone feels, the other knows that her love grew to be a burden and he preferred his freedom. It's moot to fret now, those are words said to mark the occasion. The pianist turns out to be a boy, she accepts it.It's all crystallized in the end, with her an old woman and being visited by the man she moved out to join in Paris. Maybe they would have liked to pursue what they didn't, maybe not. Nothing weighs between them. We have moved ahead as freely as we look back.Everything here is a placeholder for life that you have gone through, maybe let slip through the fingers but neither glad nor saddened. It was what it was all about, life as a series of nights you shared, talks you had, visits to someone's room. Dreyer has prepared, purified, light that suffuses the memory, mends it back into body. The mind doesn't stray anymore, even as it does. It strays without losing its bearings, without giving into anxiety or despair. Dreyer's gaze is Gertrud's soul.

Rony Conceição The Carl Dreyer's film, Gertrud, is the last masterpiece of the great director. The history treat of the woman in isolation. Adapted from a 1920s play by Hjalmar Soberberg, Gertrud plays out in long takes, with few close-ups and exterior scenes.The pace and rhythm of the actions and interactions are retarded to the point that many of the conversations take on an almost incantatory quality. A small gesture and sound effect at the very end of the coda epitomize the complexity of feeling that Dreyer creates about the worldly renunciations and imaginative substitutions in Gertrud. Though initial critical reaction to the film was largely unfavorable. The picture is deliberate and reflective but not boring. I recommend.