Gertrud is a 1964 Danish drama film written and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer; it is based on the 1906 play of the same name by Hjalmar Söderberg.

Gertrud, a former opera singer in Stockholm in the early 20th century, is married to the lawyer and politician Gustav Kanning.

The next evening the Kannings attend a dinner party at the house of the poet Gabriel Lidman, with whom Gertrud has had a relationship in the past.

In the nine-year period between films he had attempted to make films based on Euripides' Medea, William Faulkner's Light in August, and wrote treatments based on Henrik Ibsen's Brand, August Strindberg's To Damascus and Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra.

[3] The film was mostly made up of long takes of shots of two or more actors talking to each other and continued Dreyer's devotion to the principles of kammerspiel.

Over the years, Dreyer's filming style had become more and more subdued and compared to the fast cutting in The Passion of Joan of Arc or the tracking shots in Vampyr, this film contained slowed down camera shots with restricted angles and an increased length of single takes.

The cinema equipment failed several times during the screening, the subtitles were of low quality and the reels were shown in the wrong order, prompting extremely negative reactions from the audience.

Nina Pens Rode has the right luminous quality for the romantic, uncompromising Gertrud, while the men are acceptable if sometimes overindulgent in their roles.

"[9] In Esquire Magazine, Dwight Macdonald wrote that "Gertrud is a further reach, beyond mannerism into cinematic poverty and straightforward tedium.

An article in Cinéma65 wrote that "Dreyer has gone from serenity to senility...Not a film, but a two-hour study of sofas and pianos."

In defense of Gertrud, Dreyer stated that "What I seek in my films...is a penetration to my actors' profound thoughts by means of their most subtle expressions...This is what interests me above all, not the technique of cinema.

[11] Tom Milne called it "the kind of majestic, necromantic masterpiece that few artists achieve even once in a lifetime."

Penelope Houston called it "an enigmatically modern film with the deceptive air of a staidly old fashioned one...