Ordet (1955) YIFY - Download Movie TORRENT

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by sol-kay 8 / 10

Miracles don't happen anymore?

(Some Spoilers) Simple but powerful film about faith and how it can not only bring two warring families together but even bring someone back from the dead. If the belief in God by those close to him is strong enough.Having lost his faith in God a long time ago Morten Borgen, Henrik Malberg,attends church services more out of tradition then belief. Morten also seems to have influenced his older son Mikkel,Emil Hass Christensen, over the years with his semi-agnostic ideas as well. Being married to Inger, Brigitte Fedenspiel, Mikkel is a sweet and loving husband and father to both Inger and their little daughter Maren, Anne Elisabeth. Still he gets very up tight when talk about religion comes up at home. Mikkel also very upset and embarrassed about his younger brother John, Preben Leerdorff Rey,who's suffering from burn-out. That resulted from his time in college studying religion writings and theories. John has become convinced over time that he's Jesus Christ and goes around the house and countryside quoting phrases from the Bibel like an Old, or New, Testament prophet. Morten's youngest son Anders Cay Krisiansen, has fallen in love with the local Tailor's Peter Skraedder, Ejner Federspiel,daughter Anne, Greda Nielson. With the help of Morten's daughter-in-law Inger there's a meeting arranged between the two fathers to get Peter's permission to have Anne marry Anders. the meeting turns into a total disaster with Peter wanting nothing to do with Morten and his son Anders. The two, Peter and Morten, have been having sharp differences on religious issues for years and they really came into focus later on in the movie with Inger who was pregnant at the time. With Morten at his home Peter gets a call from Mikkel about Inger being very ill as she's about to give birth. Peter starts to feel that now his friend Morten will be tested by God like the Biblical Job. By having Inger die and having him accept what happens to her without any show of anger on his part to show his complete faith in God's work which is to test Morten.This unfeeling statement by Peter causes an angry and outraged Morten to almost clobber, and end up on nonspeaking terms with, him and end their friendship. At first Inger seems to be coming out of danger but later, after losing her baby, she just closes her eyes and stops breathing and peacefully passes away. Inger's death causes Peter to feel a deep guilt by practically telling Morten that he hoped that she'd dies. At the same time Peter leaves Morten so depressed in almost wanting to die himself. Mikkel also is at the point of having an emotional breakdown at Inger's wake not wanting to leave her side and preventing her coffin to be closed so sher could be buried in her eternal resting place. John, who was gone all this time, appears and with only young Meren believing him in his assertion that faith in God is the only force that can bring Inger back to life. If those who are now grieving for her showed that faith during her illness, instead of faith in modern medicine, this tragedy would not have happened. John then not only does the impossible but shows everyone there that he wasn't the unstable and irrational parson that they all thought that he was all these years. In fact he was a man of deep faith and conviction in God who never wavered in his strong and unshakable beliefs. No matter how hard they were tested by the events spinning around him. Slow paced film that has an underlying and invisible force to it that doesn't really show itself until well into the movie. John who we all thought was somewhat mad is the person brings everyone in the movie together by making them realize that there is a God and the real proof of his existence is all around us. If we just take the time and effort to look.

Reviewed by aroth15 9 / 10

Sublimely Affecting Film

Well, I grew up in a religious home, and I was religious until around 22. I've been an atheist since then, and I had a very hard struggle to leave the religious world. I generally have very little patience with people who really believe in God and other such nonsense and fairy tales. But this film left me breathless, and I don't know why. Interestingly enough, when I heard all the quotes that Windfoot mentions, I wasn't very impressed with them, because they are all basically platitudes, trite expressions and homilies that every kid learns to parrot, religious or not. I felt that all those commonplace ideas like goodness, and kindness, and ethics are ordinary human values, which even a person who is not religious believes. But miracles, revelation, and such are, of course, completely different. The ending of the film was so affecting to me. Partly I think it is because the direction and stylization of the miracle is so honest and unencumbered by the juvenile and silly "special effects" that we have come to expect so often. The way that Dreyer presents the lives of these people--simple, honest, genuine, is so different from most everything we see today. True--there was primitive inhumanity displayed, in the refusal of both fathers to agree to a genuine love match between their children. This was very upsetting. All I could think was--"What would Jesus Christ have said to these two old unfeeling men, who were refusing to allow their children to marry--in the name of a religion based supposedly on love??" Only after Inger dies do they both realize how important love is, in a world callous and unfeeling. The film could conceivably have ended at that point, and it would have been a beautiful, albeit somewhat hackneyed story. Don't forget that the point of the miracle is to illustrate what Johannes (John) claims: That everyone there claims they are religious, but they don't really believe. If they would, they could bring Inger back to life. I am rambling....I really do not understand why this film had such an impact on me. I think it took courage for a filmmaker to go the way he did. Everyone, I suspect, would be tempted to laugh at the ending. I honestly don't know why I didn't. Maybe because it was presented so honestly, without all the trappings of wealth and power that accompany most religious culture, whether Jewish or Christian. But I do think that the film must have a very different meaning for someone who is really religious, believes in God, from the one it had for me. I'm still thinking about what it meant for me, and trying to figure it out. I just saw the film for the first time (Thank you, TCM). More comments maybe later.

Reviewed by the red duchess 8 / 10

Demanding melodrama which may reward concentration.

'Ordet', even by Dreyer standards, is a gruelling experience, but in a different way from 'the Passion of Joan of Arc', which, with almost sadistic intensity, thrust the viewer into a visceral pummelling, dragging the spiritual out of us. 'Ordet' is more typically Scandanavian, based on a play by Kaj Munk, a cleric-playwright murdered by the Gestapo during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark.Its austerity and rigour are reminiscent of Bergman, without that director's lapses (i.e. Audience-friendly gestures) into sensation. Like Bergman, Dreyer makes no attempts to hide the theatrical origins of his material - most of the action takes place in austere interiors that even look like sets in their oppressive spaciousness, just as you can hear the boards being trod. There are no harrowing close ups a la 'Passion' here; the camera keeps an unblinking distance throughout, as if we were watching a play in the theatre. The performances make no concessions to film acting, keeping a stern solemnity as they utter their tersely simple dialogue.So why would Dreyer, one of the five greatest film directors of all time, make such a seemingly uncinematic picture? Part of the answer probably derives from the film's theme, that of faith and miracles. Although the film is as restrained and grim as you would expect from a Scandanavian work, the content is actually full of barely suppressed passion.The situation and plots are straight out of classic 19th century realist literature - a stubbornly proud landowner refuses to let his youngest son marry a wealthy neighbour because of religious differences; his eldest son goes mad from studying too much theology, hoping to fulfil his father's messianic dreams, under the delusion that he is Jesus, with beard too match, although a joyless, Old-Testament kind of prophet-Jesus; another son has renounced his faith, disgusted with the daily evidence of God's indifference; his pious wife loses her baby in childbirth.Material ripe for hothouse treatment. And yet Dreyer's reticence never lets it descend into 'Elmer Gantry'isms. The film works as a study in loneliness, in the limited options open to people in isolated outposts made rigid by tradition, religion, culture etc. Dreyer makes a virtue of the theatrical material: his use of doorways, his patterning of entries and exits, his positioning of characters, his calm yet insistent panning all created this sense of something being held in, ready to burst.The film opens with a brilliantly orchestrated sequence, which introduces the characters, their dilemmas and their milieu, with a simple, yet intricate pattern, as each family member searches for the missing mad brother, a man linked to nature, the light and the dunes. His strictures are hard to take, and yet he is the one with the special knowledge and the miraculous power.I'm not averse to miracles in cinema. I just found this one a little hard to take (it would certainly never have been produced in a Catholic country - Mother surviving baby? An outrage!). I prefer the way Dreyer turns the rare modern intrusions in the film, the doctor's car for instance, into a scary, almost medieval vision of death in motion; or the chillingly glum view of village life, in a film that keeps implicating the social only to drive it out. I guess you've got to have some knowledge of the theological background.

Ordet

1955 [DANISH]

Action / Drama / Fantasy

Ordet

1955 [DANISH]

Action / Drama / Fantasy

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Movie Reviews

Miracles don't happen anymore?

Sublimely Affecting Film

Demanding melodrama which may reward concentration.

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