Master of the House

Before Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer made his reputation with the 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, he helmed this 1925 tale set in a middle-class household, in which a tyrant of a husband and father Viktor's (Johannes Meyer) constant bullying and criticisms bring his hard-working wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), to the point of a near-breakdown. When Ida is spirited away by her mother to recover, Viktor's former nanny (a wily old woman played with spunk by Mathilde Nielsen) takes charge of the household to teach him a lesson. The action takes place almost entirely in the family apartment, which Dreyer painstakingly constructed to match the simplicity of real-life homes, observing the daily routine with a documentarian's patience and a painter's delicacy. After Ida leaves, drama gives way to low-key domestic comedy driven by the (unnamed) nanny as she punctures Viktor's arrogance and sense of entitlement. But Dreyer also takes into account how Viktor lost his self-esteem when his business failed, adding a note of compassion to the comic undercurrent of this rich portrait of middle-class life in Denmark during the depression of the 1920s. While not as well-known as Dreyer's subsequent works, this handsome, elegant film is considered his first major work. Criterion presents a Blu-ray/DVD Combo set and a DVD-only edition, both featuring a new digital restoration and a piano score by Gillian B. Anderson, as well as extras including a visual essay by film historian David Bordwell, an interview with a Dreyer historian Casper Tybjerg, and a booklet with an essay by film scholar Mark Le Fanu. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)