Review of Dogville (2003) by Nick O — 08 Dec 2013

A watchdog wails at the entrance to the runty mountain town called Dogville, but the real dogs are the town's civil inhabitants. Danish auteur Lars von Trier lies in dead heat with German writer-director Michael Haneke when it comes to who can craft Lynchian nightmares the rawest. What has the chops to be the former's most sweeping feature yet -- in which a pretty, stepford-looking blonde on the run from a group of nondescript mobsters washes up on the tight-knit communal plateau of Dogville, Colorado -- actually turns out to be his least cinematic, a story told in nine specific chapters and filmed entirely on a soundstage, the physical roofs of huts and barns only occasionally seen via overhead angles complete with fairy tale narrations by a suitably droll John Hurt. The rest of the three-hour runtime is told unflinchingly through handheld digital camera. The end result is one of the most disorienting at-home movie experiences I've ever witnessed, though also...well, charmed isn't exactly the right term. (Semi-charmed?).

Von Trier, like the aforementioned David Lynch or Haneke (probably others too, I'm just not THAT cultured in film history I guess), essentially coordinates narrative and visual devices to register as particularly meaningful dreams. Each of his opuses thus far -- from "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark" to "Antichrist" and "Melancholia" -- share similar moral foundations of good being consumed by evil; innocence by arrogance. Another key theme in his panache is man's perception and subsequent treatment of women. In "Dogville" the porcelain Hollywood beauty Nicole Kidman plays Grace, whose instinctually refined personality traits run a diffuse ripple through the bleak, black tensions of the movie's titularly urbane municipal.

How "Dogville" succumbs to the primitive second natures of this barely peopled town should remain unspoiled, but what von Trier finally twists his latest masterpiece into is, fair warning, somewhat of a subjectively cruel joke. Don't take his word for it though. "Dogville" is a parable, meaning, like the best of them, the uncertainty of its social commentary should be chewed over and contemplated rather than rejected and spit out as soon as the reel cuts off. "Dogville" may be done with by then, but the chilling mystique of its agonies and ironies linger on. (94/100).