Yet, realistically, and given the dreamy nature of the film, criticisms of West’s acting are too harsh. The most similar role in film to this is Anthony Perkins’ essaying of Josef K in Orson Welles’ take on Franz Kafka’s The Trial. And while it is true that West is not anywhere near in a class with Perkins as an actor, the film’s screenplay makes sure he need not be. This is because, as a hero, Grey is mostly an observer, a passive hero; in fact, almost an antihero (not in the snarling negative sense, but in the sense of the reluctant hero).
The true classical ‘hero’ of the film is but a secondary character, a caretaker of the inn that Grey stays at. This fact shows just how daring Dreyer was as a storyteller. The reason this works is because of the excellent screenplay penned by Christen Jul, very loosely based upon British writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, about lesbian vampires, and a few other elements from other stories in the writer’s collection of tales, In A Glass Darkly.
The film follows Grey, an amateur occultist, in the French town of Courtempierre. Quickly, we are shown many of the above detailed images with no explanation. Furthermore, since Dreyer wisely disjuncts logic by having seemingly subjective shots turn out to be objective, the viewer is never allowed to plant a foot firmly in any cinematic ‘reality,’ for it all could be the wisps of Grey’s imagination — a point the film later seems to support. He is then asked by the owner of the inn he stays at to help solve some mysteries, mostly the illness of his daughter Leone, whom is shown to have been preyed upon by the town’s vampire, a fat old woman named Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gérard). Chopin hypnotically led Leone to a field, and was about to bite her when interrupted. Grey, meanwhile, has had an odd encounter at an abandoned flour mill and factory with shadows that dance and play music — a foreshadowing of scenes from Herk Harvey’s Carnival Of Souls, made thirty years later.
Back at the inn, Grey encounters a Doctor (Jan Hieronimko) who looks like Mark Twain, but really is the servant of Chopin. It is not clear whether he is a vampire as well. There is also a third villain in the film, an unnamed worker with a wooden leg, called Pegleg by the audio commentary on the DVD, provided by film expert Tony Rayns, and played by an unnamed actor. It is Pegleg whose shadow is detachable. The Doctor feigns concern for Leone, but her father and sister Gisele (Rina Mandel) do not trust him. The father is then killed by a seeming shadow, although this may just be more of Gray’s imagination, and seems to die of a stroke or heart attack.
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