So if there’s a subject that the critics who made this list like almost as much as making movies, it’s dissolving relationships, which is what we have here.

In broad outline, the plot is pretty simple: The titular heroine is no longer in love with her husband and wants a divorce; she’s taken up with a younger composer, with whom she believes she is in the kind of passionate love that she demands from a relationship, only to find that he thinks of her more as an “adventure”; meanwhile, an old flame from her past wants to rekindle things, but she has no interest in reviving a dead relationship.

Ultimately, she leaves all of them and goes off on her own to Paris to study. There’s an epilogue of her as an old woman, still single, where she reminisces with an old friend visiting from Paris (the professor with whom she studied), and they talk about how she had resisted his romantic overtures as well, because she didn’t feel the kind of passionate love that she demands. The end.

But and so, like all these movies, the reason it’s on this list is that it’s a lot better than its summary.

Visually, it manages to do something remarkable — like Dreyer’s previous Ordet (and wholly unlike his Passion of Joan of Arc), it works almost entirely in the long shot, with a fixed camera having a view of a room where people are talking. Which is remarkable here because this isn’t a stiff formal movie at all, it’s one where the characters wear their emotions on their faces, and you don’t normally think of long shots as revealing the subtle emotions of actors, but… it works. It should come off as stagy, especially when there are long takes of two characters just talking to each other in a living room, but it somehow never does.

And from a thematic perspective, it really just draws up all kinds of thoughts from all kinds of angles. Is Gertrud’s perspective of love — this all-consuming passion — too impossible and demanding? Or is her apparent contentedness with her hermit-like existence at the end of the movie meant to indicate that she was right to never compromise on that, and to have been happy with those few moments of her life that actually did rise to her own standards?

And her would-be suitor: a successful poet, feted with a hero’s dinner, who lost her by putting his art before her — when he claims that his artistic and worldly success is empty for him without love, is that just the vague dissatisfaction of a middle-aged man regretting his lost youth; or is there actually something there about the importance of people over even meaningful achievements?

And when she sleeps with the callow young composer, who brags about it to his friends and whose professions of devotion are hollow af, are we meant to sympathize with her desire for that kind of youthful love as a middle-aged woman, to think her vain in her attempts to recapture her youth, or something else entirely?

That’s a lot of question marks, and that’s because the film isn’t, I think, interested in laying out a grand treatise with all the answers; it’s providing us a glimpse into these people’s lives, portrayed honestly, and then leaving the But What Does It All Mean up to the viewer. It actually reminds me, in that respect, of Ozu’s Late Spring, which offered up the same kind of intimate and honest portrayal of people and their relationships to each other.

This is a quiet, simple movie, but one with the depth to earn its place on this list.