A Film Canon

The Parson's Widow exudes earthiness, framing its characters in lush, bucolic nature, until the wood and stone of their houses feels freshly cut, continuous with the surrounding forest, and their faces are transformed into so many vegetable surfaces - albeit in a more comic, picaresque tone than Dreyer's subsequent efforts, as evinced in the creases and wrinkles of the widow that Parson Sofren (Einar Rod) - whose face has a proportionately modern, and even slapstick, quality -  finds himself forced to marry, upon taking up office in a remote parish. That said, this continuity doesn't fully extend to the spaces that these building materials cushion, which partake of a constriction, and even claustrophobia, that is pointedly contrasted with the expansiveness of the exteriors, connoting a particularly medieval juxtaposition of the domestic and cosmic - the Universe at the doorstep - or, alternatively, an inability to imagine the middle distance, and hence perspective. The result is a broad, sometimes crude, comedy played out against the backdrop of that Universe, which imbues it with a stark majesty unbeknownst to itself, at least until the final epiphany.