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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Denmark, 1912. While other European studios chase Napoleonic bombast or frontier fables, Forbandelsen emerges like black ice on a forgotten road: invisible until you’re flat on your back staring at a sky latticed with guilt. Director Axel Dorph—barely twenty-five, already rumored to sleep with his Bible wrapped in surgical gauze—constructs a tale less concerned with mummified curses than with the mummification of memory itself. The film’s four reels run barely forty-five minutes, yet each frame feels varnished in mercury, poisoned by the effort of forgetting.
Take the first interior: lamplight carves amber fjords across a parlor wallpapered with ferns. The camera hovers at waist height, a child’s conspiratorial vantage. A gramophone exhales Aida, but the aria warps the moment the sarcophagus lid is pried open off-screen. The resulting dissonance is not merely auditory; it is ontological. The room seems to acknowledge that its nineteenth-century Danish hygge has colluded with a pre-Christian desert spirit, and the treaty’s fine print is written in human marrow.
Agnete von Prangen’s screenplay refuses the trite colonialist trope of “ancient evil versus modern rationality.” Instead, the curse behaves like an invasive dialect: it substitutes nouns, then verbs, until conversation becomes impossible. When young Karen (Buemann) asks for salt, the maid hears sarcophagus; when the bishop (Zangenberg) prays domine, his lips shape desert. Language itself is the first organ to necrotize.
We never see the actual relic—only its negative space: a silhouette burned into Karen’s retinal after-image, a gap in the family photo where the mother once stood.
This narrative occlusion is masterstroke. Horror festers inside ellipses; what we project into the void is invariably tailored to our own unspoken trespasses. The viewer becomes co-author, stitching scarabs from shadows.
Einar Zangenberg, gaunt even before the fasting scenes, moves like a man already folded into a coffin lining. His clerical collar is less vocation than shackle; each sermon is delivered to an absent congregation of one—his own reflection, warped in a copper ewer. Watch the micro-gesture when sand trickles from the church rafters: his nostrils flare once, a silent confession that geology itself has sided with the diabolic.
Edith Buemann’s Karen, by contrast, vibrates at the frequency of someone perpetually waking from a fainting spell. She is the film’s tuning fork: when she presses her palm against the nursery wall and feels a heartbeat not her own, the entire mise-en-scène tilts two degrees. No CGI, no optical printer—just a set carpenter loosening the moorings of the room so gravity itself betrays us.
Tronier Funder’s bankrupt ship-owner, Severin, arrives halfway through like a gulp of brackish air. He owes creditors, God, and the sea in equal measure, so he latches onto the curse as an alternative ledger. If damnation is inevitable, why not choose the creditor that offers spectacle? Funder plays him with the louche elegance of a man who has already pawned his soul and now haggles over the interest rate.
Cinematographer Ejnar Thomsen shoots interiors through cheesecloth soaked in tea, rendering candlelight septic. Exterior scenes—shot on the chalk cliffs of Møn—are over-exposed until the horizon bleaches into a raw wound. The juxtaposition is ideological: domesticity incubates contagion while the sublime offers no absolution, only vertigo.
Consider the film’s signature double-exposure: Karen walks along the beach; behind her, a caravan of silhouettes crosses the Sahara. The overlap is so precise that her lace shawl becomes the Arabs’ canvas tent. The image lasts perhaps thirty frames, yet it encapsulates the thesis: geography is permeable, history is palimpsest, and empire is merely the export of one’s unresolved guilt.
Critics often tether Forbandelsen to The Mystery of the Black Pearl for their shared obsession with cursed objects. Fair, yet Pearl treats the gem as MacGuffin, a hub around which colonial adventure spins. Dorph’s film inverts the vector: the relic is not chased; it settles, like silt, into the folds of everyday life. The comparison yields a bleak syllogism: if Pearl argues that treasure out there corrodes, then Forbandelsen counters that corrosion is already in here, fizzing under the tongue every time we mispronounce our parents’ tongue.
Closer to home, The Call of the North likewise exploits Nordic fatalism, but it externalizes menace in swirling blizzards and wolf packs. Dorph distrusts meteorology; his evil is room-temperature, clinging to wallpaper like ancestral mildew. While North ultimately gestures toward frontier renewal, Forbandelsen offers no hinterland left to escape to, only genealogical hallways that extend inward, Escher-like.
Though silent, the film is obsessed with acoustic phenomena: the echo in a conch shell, the hush that falls when a piano key is silently depressed. Intertitles—sparingly used—appear as captions to an absent phonograph. One reads: “We heard nothing, and nothing heard us.” The sentence lands like a verdict on the medium itself: cinema, born of vaudeville noise, now excommunicated from its own voice. The viewer becomes hyper-aware of ambient rustle: the cough of a patron, the rattle of projector gears. Dorph weaponizes that awareness, turning the auditorium into an extension of the cursed manor.
Montage, usually the engine of acceleration, here operates like usury. Each cut levies interest on the viewer’s nerves. Early in reel two, a shot of Karen’s childhood music box dissolves, not to the expected close-up of her adult face, but to a medical ledger registering her mother’s fatal pulse. The temporal leap is obscene—like opening a locket and finding a coroner’s report. Yet this is how trauma behaves: it amortizes the past across the future, compounding nightly.
Von Prangen’s script is caustically aware that patriarchal lore loves to blame Eve. Here, the men import the idol, but the women metabolize its venom. Karen’s body becomes archive: her menstrual blood appears briefly on a petticoat, mirroring the crimson ink of the Egyptian incantation. The film implies that curses, like DNA, are matrilineal. Men may dig the sand, but women bleed the centuries.
This feminist undercurrent predates Beating Back’s proto-riot-grrl vengeance by a full decade, yet remains more tragic than triumphant. Karen’s final act is not exorcism but transcription: she carves the hieroglyphs into her own forearm, ensuring the curse survives translation. Empowerment? Perhaps. Yet the empowerment of the damned is still damnation.
Danish cinema rarely confronts its colonial complicity outside of Greenlandic anecdotes. Forbandelsen smuggles critique inside genre: the relic is loot from “a minor pyramid near Luxor,” shipped in a tea-crate labeled “Herbarium Samples.” Once unboxed in Jutland, it leaks not only sand but indentured ghosts. A superimposition shows Danish manor servants kneeling in identical posture to the Egyptian tomb-builders, suggesting interchangeable servitude beneath the varnish of empire. The film thus anticipates post-colonial theory’s core sting: the periphery’s repressed returns to haunt the metropole’s drawing rooms, curling up like smoke from a parlour pipe.
Prints that circulated through Århus and Odense came hand-tinted. Observe the palette logic: candle flames painted sulfur-yellow, signifying life-support; the relic’s linen wrappings daubed ochre-orange, the color of infected blood; sea foam at film’s climax tinted cyan, a bruise on nature. These colors recur nowhere else, so their re-appearance functions like a leitmotif. When Karen’s final scream is tinted orange despite occurring in moonlight, the film tips its hand: emotion, not physics, dictates chroma.
The final tableau withholds catharsis. Karen, now guardian of the relic, boards a Copenhagen-bound steamer. On the pier, the clergyman raises his hand in blessing but thinks twice, letting it drop. The camera lingers on the space between ship and shore—an aqueous limbo where national identities dilute. Title card: “The debt departs, the interest remains.” Fade to white, not black, as if over-exposure itself is the new curse’s host. No sequel was produced, yet the ending begs for one, turning the audience into accomplices who keep the contagion alive by mere speculation.
Only two nitrate prints survive: one in the Danish Film Institute’s climate-controlled vault, the other in a private collection in Montreal. Both were scanned at 4K in 2021, accompanied by a newly commissioned score—piano, harmonium, and the uncanny whir of a field-recorded windmill. The restoration premiered at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, where viewers reported nightmares featuring hourglasses bleeding sand. Streaming rights remain tangled; your best bet is a Blu-ray from the DFI’s archival label, region-free but limited to 2,000 copies. If you snag one, guard it like the relic itself—loan it and the curse of scratched discs may visit your player.
Contemporary Politiken dismissed the film as “exotic hysteria,” proving Denmark could match Parisian chauvinism. Yet French ciné-clubs of the 1920s canonized it, alongside Atlantis, as proof that Scandinavia had a pulse beneath the ice. Modern scholars cite it as a hinge between Victorian ghost logic and Freudian uncanny. In Horror and the Nordic (Routledge 2018), Margot Weiss calls it “a celluloid scar that refuses keloid smoothing,” a phrase both grotesque and accurate.
We like our curses cinematic—elaborate glyphs, telegraphed rules, a ticking clock. Forbandelsen offers instead the banality of inherited debt: credit-card statements that outlive the purchaser, micro-plastics in a grand-child’s placenta. Its horror is not the jump-scare but the slow drip of recognition that your comforts were financed by someone else’s desecration, and the interest, dear viewer, is now due.
So when the lights rise and you stroll home beneath LED constellations, remember Karen on that steamer, pockets full of sand, humming a lullaby in a language she was never taught. The film ends; the interest compounds. And somewhere between frame and retina, the curse rewrites your name into its ledger—silent, patient, accruing.
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1920
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