If Jonathan Rosenbaum is right and The Parson's Widow was the "first artistic success among [Carl Theodor Dreyer's] early silent pictures," then it is nevertheless a minor one. There is nothing extraordinary about the cinematography. The performances are capable, but pedestrian. All of the drama in the film comes from the slow, eventual revelations concerning the characters' psychology and motivations: is the eponymous widow a witch or just an old woman, was the new parson bewitched or was he just a lazy bum, does the widow have some ulterior motive in marrying the parson or is she just lonely? However, the first act of the film crawls by at such a glacial pace that it almost put me to sleep. By the time the third act arrived complete with all of the story's major twists and turns, I was damn near emotionally exhausted. Dreyer's later silent films like The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) would be more evenly balanced from a pacing standpoint.
7/10
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