Lars von Trier's first entry in his "Depression Trilogy" is a graphic, deeply uncomfortable journey through couple-therapy gone primordial. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg commit to the material with terrifying intensity, anchored by the famous prologue that may be the most beautiful sequence of horror in modern cinema.
Lars von Trier films a couple's grief in a cabin and lets nature, language, and the body do everything horror cinema usually outsources. The film's images haunt; the argument is not the point.
Lars von Trier's grief tract becomes a forest of bad omens and self-mutilation — read it as a horror, read it as a confession, read it as a provocation; the film resists all three.
