Grey then opens a package sent to him by an unknown and unseen person (one of many mysteries unresolved in the film, but which heighten its dream-like ‘logic’), and it turns out to be a book on vampires. There is a nice in-joke in that the publisher is shown first, and it’s called Gottlieb Faust (German for God loves Faust), but the very need for Grey to read a book on the subject matter betrays how recent the belief in, and mythos of, vampires took hold in Western pop culture. It also allows for a deepening of the film’s psychology. Prior to this moment, the film has had a few intertitle cards (a la in silent films) that pushed the action along, and allowed for narrative ellipses. Yet, all of these were from ‘objective points of view.’ The book’s narration, read first by Grey, and later by the inn’s handyman and true ‘hero’ (Albert Bras), allows a more subjective viewpoint to intrude amongst the tangle of points of view that the film’s visuals weave because the intertitles were only being read by the viewers, whereas the book is being read by the characters and the viewers, which makes the characters aware, with the viewers, of what may really be occurring. The book also gives needed backstory on Chopin, and pushes the story forward.
The characters in this film are not psychologically deep, but such ellipses force the viewer to reconstruct a narrative from the intriguing fragments, and it is this imbuement by the viewer, in co-creation with what Dreyer gives visually, which crafts the film’s narrative and psychological depth. The screenplay, thus, like in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Last Year In Marienbad, lets its minimalist-seeming screenplay draw depths from its percipients, rather than swamping them in the murky catacombs of melodrama and genre fluff. In this way, Vampyr, like the two aforementioned films, is a very interactive film, one that needs to be engaged, but which gives more than enough to elicit such engagement. If it did not it would be a failed pretentious piece of hermetic art. It is not.
The Doctor, meanwhile, schemes, and captures Gisele. Grey goes to look for her while the handyman decides to find Chopin’s coffin and stake her. Grey runs across the countryside, then rests on a bench, where he seemingly dozes off. His transparent dream self then finds where Gisele is being hidden, and comes across a nightmarish scene, where he sees his own corpse (a third Grey) being sealed in a coffin for burial, eyes wide open, by the Doctor and Pegleg. Pegleg screws the coffin lid shut, and we are given the vantage point of Grey’s unblinking corpse looking out a small window in the coffin. There we see Chopin glaring down at him. As the Doctor and Pegleg transport Grey’s corpse for burial, we see the move to the outside, as ceiling gives way to sky. At the site where the coffin is to be buried, we see the sleeping Grey awaken as his spectral self returns within him, and the coffin, Pegleg, and Doctor fade. This is one of a few instances of explicit dreaming intersecting with reality (another being a scene where a skeleton tries to poison Grey as the Doctor, in the working world, tries to poison Leone); but what makes it work so well is that Dreyer has other scenes that seem manifest dreams, only to have them never be revealed as such.
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