A vampire movie from the great Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer, an approate subject given his preoccupation with the supernatural. 'Vampyr' was filmed and set in France, however the best surviving cut is the German one, I watched that with English subtitles.
I appreciate that this isn't another telling of the Dracula story, rather the narrative was inspired by mid 19th century short story's by the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. Allen Gray, a young man studying the occult, comes to a small French village recently subject to vampire activity, there he studies and learns how to fight them with the help of an elderly local Lord (Maurice Schutz). Gray is played by Nicolas de Gunzburg, a producer on the film and not a professional actor, in fact there are many non actors in the cast. The leads performance is minimalistic but that works here; de Gunzburg, who was gay and never married, was perhaps most famous in life as an editor at Vogue and other classy American magazines.
The movie is pleasantly short at about an hour and fourteen minutes. Dreyer employs some subtlety disconcerting visuals, which help compensate for a slow narrative. The film was not a hit on initial release but gained a cult following in subsequent decades. ***
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