Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: The Czech Surrealist Fairy Tale

Some films resist plot summary the way water resists being held in a fist. Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders — Valerie a týden divů, 1970 — is one of them. You can list what happens in it: a girl of about thirteen loses a pair of magic earrings, meets a vampiric predator who may be her grandfather and her father and a lecherous priest all at once, watches her grandmother strike a monstrous bargain for restored youth, and passes through a week in which every adult around her turns out to want something from her body. But the listing tells you almost nothing, because the film is built to be experienced as a dream that keeps rewriting its own rules while you watch.

That is the achievement, and it is why the film has outlived nearly all of its arthouse contemporaries. Valerie takes the most universal and most frightening passage in a life — a child’s first collision with adult sexuality and mortality — and renders it in the only grammar honest to how that passage actually feels from inside: the shifting, unstable, beautiful-and-menacing logic of a dream you cannot wake from.

A poet’s novel, a New Wave film

The source is a 1935 novel by Vítězslav Nezval, one of the leading figures of Czech Surrealism and a founder of the Poetist movement. Nezval wrote Valerie as a deliberate pastiche and homage to the gothic and the roman noir, a Surrealist’s love letter to penny-dreadful vampires and lascivious monks, and Jireš’s film keeps that doubled quality — sincerely eerie and knowingly playful at once.

Jireš belonged to the Czech New Wave, the extraordinary run of filmmaking that came out of the Prague film school FAMU in the sixties and was throttled by the Soviet-backed Normalisation that followed the 1968 invasion. Valerie arrived in 1970, right at the closing of that window, which gives it the poignancy of a last flowering. Where his New Wave peers were making sharp social satire, Jireš turned inward and mythic, and the retreat into fairy tale reads in hindsight as its own kind of resistance: a refusal to speak the flattened official language, an insistence on the private, uncensorable world of dream.

The young Jaroslava Schallerová plays Valerie, and the film’s tact around her is worth stating plainly. Its subject is the threat that adult desire poses to a child, and it films that threat as horror — the predators are vampires and hypocrites, the awakening is shadowed by menace. It belongs firmly to the Criterion register of serious European art cinema about the terrors of growing up, and it treats its heroine as the one clear-eyed innocent in a world of grasping adults.

Dream logic as deliberate architecture

The thing to understand about Valerie is that its refusal of coherent plot is a design, executed with total control. Characters transform into one another. The kindly grandmother becomes a predatory rival for youth and then perhaps Valerie’s mother and then a bishop’s mistress; the missionary priest Gracián and the vampiric constable figure (called the Weasel, or Tchoř) and the absent father blur into a single male threat wearing different masks. Time folds. A death is undone. The magic earrings function as a protective charm that keeps pulling Valerie back from each danger.

None of this is confusion. It is the precise texture of a mind at the threshold of adulthood, where the trusted adults of childhood suddenly reveal appetites, where a grandmother’s love and a stranger’s predation start to feel like versions of the same hunger, where the body itself becomes uncanny. The film opens with a drop of blood — the onset of menstruation rendered as the first “wonder” of the week — and everything that follows unfolds from that single physiological fact turned mythological. Jireš understood that adolescence does not feel like a linear narrative. It feels like a dream in which the familiar has quietly become strange, and he built the whole film to reproduce that feeling in the viewer.

This is the same Central European instinct — political constraint metabolised into oneiric imagery — that runs through Fantastic Planet, animated in Prague in the same years, and through the giddy anarchism of Daisies. Where Chytilová weaponised the dream into comedy, Jireš tuned it toward the gothic. Both trusted the audience to swim in imagery without a handrail.

Why the craft lands

The reason Valerie seduces rather than merely bewilders comes down to two elements working in lockstep: the photography and the score.

Jan Čuřík’s cinematography bathes the film in a soft, blossoming light — sun through orchard leaves, white lace, dappled courtyards — that keeps the horror always adjacent to beauty. The visual world is pastoral and radiant, an idealised provincial idyll, and the predators move through it like stains. That contrast is the engine of the film’s unease. If the vampires stalked through fog and ruins, we would know exactly where we stood. Filming them in sunlight, among flowers and clean linen, Jireš makes the menace feel like something rotting inside paradise, which is a far more accurate picture of how childhood curdles.

Then there is the music by Luboš Fišer, one of the most beloved scores in Czech cinema — a fragile weave of choir, harpsichord and folk melody that sounds like a hymn dreamed by someone slightly feverish. It is devotional and sinister at the same time, and it does enormous work holding the film’s shifting images together. When the story dissolves from one impossibility to the next, the score provides the through-line, a consistent emotional key that tells you this is all one continuous reverie. Take Fišer’s music away and the film would fragment; with it, the fragments cohere into a spell.

Where it sits, and where to find it

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has become a touchstone far outside its origins — championed by the folk-horror revival, cited by musicians and designers, its imagery seeded through decades of dream-pop and gothic aesthetics. That afterlife is deserved, but it can flatten the film into a mood board. Watched whole, it is more rigorous and more disquieting than its prettiest stills suggest, genuinely engaged with the fear at the heart of growing up.

There is also a lineage worth tracing forward. The film’s fusion of the pastoral and the predatory, its child’s-eye gothic and its refusal to explain itself, prefigures a whole strand of later folk horror and dream-cinema that trusts atmosphere over plot. Watch it before a modern folk-horror piece and you can see where much of that grammar was first assembled, decades ahead of the revival that would eventually claim it as an ancestor.

It has been restored and released through the Criterion Collection and screens regularly in repertory programmes devoted to the Czech New Wave and to surrealist cinema. That is the way to meet it — on a good print, with Fišer’s score intact, given over to it without trying to solve it. Do not go in looking for a puzzle to decode. Go in the way you would surrender to a dream, and let the week of wonders happen to you.

Spoilers below

The film’s deepest move is its treatment of the vampire, the figure called the Weasel or Constable who is also styled as a missionary and shadows Valerie throughout. He is presented, at different moments, as her grandfather, as her long-absent father, and as the bishop who tries to have her burned — the collapsing of paternal protector and sexual predator into one shifting monster. This is the nightmare the whole film circles: that the men meant to guard a child may be the ones who threaten her, and that a young girl learning this cannot always tell the faces apart.

The grandmother’s arc is the other blade. She strikes a bargain — her soul, or Valerie’s inheritance, for restored youth and beauty — and reappears transformed into a younger woman who becomes a rival, a mistress, and at moments seems to merge with Valerie’s own dead mother. The film refuses to fix her identity, and the instability is the point: the girl is watching the women ahead of her trade away their integrity for the approval of predatory men, and dreading her own place in that line.

What redeems the film from pure horror is its ending, and it is quietly radiant. Having passed through vampirism, attempted seduction, betrayal and a near-burning, Valerie is not destroyed. The final images gather every threatening figure — grandmother, father, priest, the Weasel, the young lovers Eaglet and Hedvika — into a single sunlit meadow, no longer menacing, arranged around her like a tableau at the edge of sleep. Valerie lies down in the grass among them and closes her eyes. The week of wonders resolves into rest. The reading Jireš leaves us is generous and hard-won: the child survives the dream, absorbs it, and carries its knowledge into whatever comes next, unbroken. The nightmare was also, all along, an initiation she came through whole.