MovieChat Forums > Day of Wrath (2006) Discussion > What did the letters mean?

What did the letters mean?

posted 15 years ago by phledd
2 replies | jump to latest

I never could figure out what the letters had to do with the price of tea in China, OR why suddenly the "Hungarian mercenary" suddenly became the good guy OR if Ruy had all the people on the list killed then who was bringing him tribute? (and truthfully, how many Hungarian mercenaries are going to be running around Spain...they were the earliest Protestant 'heretics' in Christendom to boot!!)

The end was disgusting on a lot of levels;good cop turned bad; jewish victims savaging other jews; slaughtering people for the sake of slaughter;

It would be wonderful to have really good, well thought out movie on the theme of Marraños (secret jews).. There were so many facinating things to explore that were just handled indifferently and incidentally, if at all--the home life of secret jews, the dissimulation and compromises, the alliances, the worship, the achievements.

And even the novel idea of a police whodunit dressed in 16th century spanish leather tights could've been rather cool...but this movie just went splat in more ways than one. I agree with other posters that someone must have pruned a whole heck of a lot from this movie because the sequence of connexions between people and events were just fuzzy and disjointed.

[–] chicago85 13 years ago

There was a scene where the man who turned out to be his uncle explained the letters represented a phrase but I don't remember what it was. Not that it mattered. The sheriff was told he must have missed some murders since there were letters missing. Then his uncle said they were hiding so completely as Jews that even the phrase had to be in Spanish instead of Hebrew because someone might figure it out. How stupid can you get.

His uncle told him to limit himself to killing only those they found were part of the extortion plot. Earlier the ringleader said "they have killed four people but only two were of us." At that point the uncle was killing blindly.

Some of these people still exist. I don't remember the Spanish word used in Mexico but they are referred to as Cypto Jews or "hidden jews."

Even into this century the Catholic authorities tried to hunt them down. They would ask neighbors questions about how they swept the floor, candles in ther windows, eating practices, etc.

In WWII the Nazis pressured authorities in places like Majorca to turn over information about hidden Jews so they could kill them.

"Just because you may be paranoid doesn't mean there isn't someone behind you watching."

[–] gordon_sabaduquia 11 years ago

The Governor, Lord Francisco del Ruiz, explains that the letters, when completely spelled out would have been, "DIES IRAE" Latin for "Day of Wrath" - the title of the movie. Dies Irae is the beginning of the Latin translation of the Hebrew reference to the Day of Judgement, Yom HaDin, in Zephaniah 1:15-16. It was also a part of the Roman Catholic liturgy, the Requiem Mass for the dead. Catholics would have construed the meaning of the phrase differently from Crypto-Jews who would have understood the hidden significance of the phrase.