Epidemic (1987) User Reviews

Weird film. To watch only if in the right mood.

[siderite · 5/10 · 11 June 2005]

I obviously was in the right mood, since I don't give it a horrible mark. I do give it a 6 out of 10, because it is obviously such a low budget movie and it's definitely very original, but other than that, I am still amazed I watched it till the end.

Two screenwriters are trying to do in 5 days what they barely succeeded in one and a half years, that is write a script. They lost their original screenplay, which by now they can barely remember how it started, due to a bad disk. Each day is accompanied with scenes of their creative process, scenes from the movie they would do and dialogues with different people.

Now it happens that I've just written an IMDb comment that said "Funny little things: Udo Kier plays a short role in this movie, and he is really young". Deja vu! Udo Kier plays in this one, as well.

The movie is shot in black and white, probably by the same single camera, and the sound is almost not processed giving the whole movie a documentary like feeling. There are a lot of things written between the lines, the satire of the government and film industry being the most obvious.

Conclusion: you should watch this mostly if you're Danish. Else if you are a movie critic or deep into films. It is NOT a horror movie. A movie that has some gore at the very end is not horror. And also you have to have the right set of mind to watch it.

Lars Redeemed

[SheBear · 3 February 2005]

In Epidemic two story lines play out simultaneously with both reaching the same, inevitable conclusion. The first storyline is shot in documentary style and follows screenwriters Lars & Niels while they write a script called Epidemic. The second storyline is a lushly photographed production of the film that the characters are writing.

Epidemic is about the process of creation. The screenwriters begin as idealists - their vision is pure and remains so as long as the creation is contained. Once the creation/script/disease is introduced/unleashed to the world it becomes both an object to be corrupted as well as a force which corrupts.

It all ends, as any von Trier movie should, with a suffering woman and this one's a little heavy handed even by von Trier's standards. Gitte's hypnotically induced wig-out is an obvious foreshadowing of everyone's demise and although it is difficult to watch her deterioration she is quite a site to behold.

It is fitting that the most accurate and succinct description of a Lars von Trier film should come from the man himself and it is in Epidemic that he famously proclaims, "a film should be like a pebble in your shoe." And so it is.

Deceptive, Messy, Boring, Annoying and Pretentious Movie with Disconnected Ideas

[claudio_carvalho · 2/10 · 3 March 2014]

The screenwriters Lars and Niels are writing the screenplay of an outbreak like many other plagues in Europe. In the story, the renowned epidemiologist Dr. Mesmer decides to leave the Faculty of Medicine to go to the outskirt of the city to give assistance to the inhabitants. Soon, a mysterious disease is spread in the real world. Then the writers travel to Germany for a meeting and then they visit their producer, where they meet a hypnotized woman that is sick.

"Epidemic" is a deceptive, messy, boring, annoying and pretentious collection of disconnected ideas and senseless subplots by Lars von Trier with an awful grainy cinematography in black and white. I was tempted to stop the DVD, but unfortunately the box of the Trilogy of Lars von Trier was very expensive and I decided to watch until the irritating conclusion with a woman crying and screaming for a long period before committing suicide, increasing to my loss of money a complete loss of time. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Epidemic"

This Hypnotic Abstraction is Truly Very Atmospheric and Creepy.

[jzappa · 8/10 · 9 September 2009]

Epidemic appears to be all stylistic self-indulgence. It is filmed in black and white, with often purposely redundant subtitles. Each shot is very very long. Some are stoic, some are suddenly goofy, some are disturbing, mostly stoic. When there is dialogue, it is intellectually stimulating, but borderline irrelevant.

Mainly, it is that director Lars Von Trier and his screenplay collaborator Niels Vorsel play themselves, coming up with a last-minute script for a producer. This strand takes disproportionate turns with scenes from their script, in which Von Trier plays a radical doctor attempting to cure a modern-day epidemic. In an warped turn, the doctor finds that he himself has been spreading it. For so long, one is left without a clue as to why there is such a coincidence between the screenplay and the outside world, or any progressions of the different narrative strands' signifying signs. But it infects you. It burns you.

Whether or not the film is narcissistic, it is not form over function. Essentially, it is a basic exercise in what metaphysically affects the viewer. Consider the scene of the darker, quieter of the screenwriters in the subway, knowing predeterminately that the other one is going to die. Or when he looks in a mirror, turns to us, the camera, then the mirror again. Everything one expects would create a cohesive, sense-making narrative film is inverted and indeed develops an immediately conscious connection between itself and the audience.

That is not to say it eschews any fundamental aspect of quality. Udo Kier delivers one of the most amazing, fantastic performances I have ever seen. Really, many of the performances, whoever these actors, or characters, are, shock and deeply move us. Some scenes are entirely made up of uproarious laughter or breakdowns of screaming, in spite of the unapologetic stoicism and quiet permeating the film.

This hypnotic abstraction is truly very atmospheric and creepy. It is a transcendental, almost physiologically affecting virus that infests you for days upon being subjected to it. It is something that has to be seen and can hardly be explained. And that makes it a true work of art.

Boring and Pretentious

[TheExpatriate700 · 3/10 · 9 February 2012]

Epidemic sounded like it had an interesting concept when I got it from Netflix. The film follows the parallel stories of two screenwriters writing a script about a plague even as an epidemic breaks out around them, and scenes from the film they are writing. Leave it to Danish auteur Lars von Trier to ruin what could have been an extremely interesting movie.

The film's problem is that it has no real plot per se, just a series of unrelated images that fail to coalesce into a unified film. Large parts of the film seem to meander with no relevance to the rest of the film. At one point, the film pauses for five minutes to discuss the diseases that plague vineyards. Lars, we're here for the human epidemic, not to hear about noble rot!

Furthermore, the film is ugly looking for the most part, shot in a grainy black and white. Although this works in a scene where they are going through a lighted tunnel, it is overall annoying. Having the title up on screen for almost the entire picture was also distracting.

There are a few interesting scenes, such as a bit with Udo Kier, but it is not enough. Only at the end does the film achieve a disturbing quality with a genuinely haunting finale. By this point, however, it's too late. The viewer has lost interest and feels that his or her time has been wasted.

The man's a genius.

[ooeht · 10/10 · 28 September 2004]

Of course, you gotta be a masochist to enjoy some people's genius - you know that if you bear with them they will take you to new levels of perception.

With Lars von Trier, the voyage is often hilarious. Epidemic is funny. Funny, in a Gummo kind of way: the characters are real, reality is eerie, and we laugh to break the tension; funny in a the characters say amusing things kind of way (preacher: "this bible is in goddamned Latin"); and funny in an Andy Kaufman screwing with the audience (yes, you) kind of way.

Make no mistake: you will suffer. If you are afraid, stay away from horror movies, ya pansy!

This movie also features some great aesthetic distance! It's bold!

Interesting Idea--Maybe Write a Screenplay Next Time

[Cineanalyst · 4/10 · 8 September 2020]

Another entry in my search to see a bunch of films about disease outbreaks, "Epidemic" is conceptually intriguing, but the actual execution is dreadful. It's amateurish, and Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel, scenarists within and without the film, seem to have approached the entire thing as a joke; the end result being that the film itself is one. And, for crying out loud, take that damn red watermark of a title off the screen already! Seriously, the title, "Epidemic," along with an e in a circle, is in the upper left side of the image for most of the picture--and in red in an otherwise black-and-white film. I thought there was something wrong with the DVD or my home-viewing equipment--I'm still not entirely sure, because it makes no sense why the title would remain there for the rest of the whole movie. The lousy lighting and noisy photography, from what mostly seems to be 16mm film, is rather a blessing in this regard, as it sometimes obscures the ever present title in indiscernible darkness. Besides that, I also wanted to smack the smirks off their faces most of the time. Stop laughing, guys; none of this is amusing except, perhaps, for part of the ending. Aside from the Grand Guignol, my favorite part has the screenwriters' boss deploring the two's lack of a full script, for which they were hired, and deploring their film's ending, which he says is "pathetic" at best.

What there is is a skeleton of a script and a plotline painted on a wall. Literally, this is what is shown in the film for the writing of the film-within-the-film, also titled "Epidemic," and it's believable that's all they really did write for this entire film. I believe they mention this lack of planning in the DVD commentary, on which the two otherwise spend most of the time giggling at themselves giggling in the stupid movie. It's obnoxious. Hard to believe one of them, von Trier, went on to be the most famous Scandinavian filmmaker since Ingmar Bergman. Regardless, the premise of the thing was promising, of the film-within-the-film infecting the outer narrative--the movie as monster, as the source of the epidemic--as the writers in the outer one have likewise been infecting the inner film. These sort of meta narratives are catnip to me, so one needs to go out of their way or, rather in this case, not go out of their way at all, to dissuade me of it.

The film even begins with what seems to have been a waste of a good pun by not making clear that their script is lost to some sort of computer "virus," with the other sort of virus deadly to people occupying the film they decide to write after losing their previous effort, which apparently was so bad they can't even remember it so as to re-write the thing. From there, we get a shaggy-dog story--like the first car ride that goes nowhere, as do several of the film's other rambling detours. The texting while driving gag--with a typewriter (this being 1987) isn't bad. At least Udo Kier's scene is an interesting telling of his birthday, too, but otherwise we get pretentious wine tasting, a story of Vørsel's creepy correspondence with teenage girls from Atlantic City, and a woman hypnotized into the film-within-the-film who bawls and screams over how awful "Epidemic" is. I didn't think it was that bad, but it was a chore to finish it.

Self-aware political allegory... or private joke?

[ThreeSadTigers · 29 December 2007]

It's common knowledge that Epidemic began it's life as a bet between von Trier and the head of the Danish Film Institute, with the emphasis being that von Trier would be unable to make a film for under one-million kroner. Trier accepted the wager, and set about constructing a film that would move away from the rigid compositions and moody atmosphere of his first film, The Element Of Crime, whilst simultaneously advancing on it's themes of post-war devastation, optimism in the face of horror, and idealism. As a result, Epidemic is presented as "part two of the Europa trilogy"... continuing on from the themes and ideologies behind his first film, whilst concurrently laying the groundwork for his third project, Europa.

Taking into account the low-budget and the intentions behind it's conception, it is at times quite difficult to view Epidemic as anything more than a private joke between von Trier and his film-industry friends. The plot is self-referential and a little cluttered, revolving around a scriptwriter and director attempting to write the outline of a screenplay in five days after a computer virus has destroyed a year and a half's worth of work. To keep costs down, von Trier and his co-writer Niels Vørsel play the filmmakers within the film, trying desperately to flesh out their story about an idealistic young doctor going from town to town in an attempt to stop a life threatening plague that is destroying the country. The bulk of the film is shot very much in the documentary style, with shambolic camera-work, rough cuts and a bare, minimal use of production design. Some have noted how this style prefigures the use of back-to-basic film-making demonstrated in von Trier's later dogme film The Idiots, which is true, though for me the effect was more akin to von Trier and Vørsel's classic TV mini-series, The Kingdom.

The rest of the film is made up of beautifully photographed fantasy scenes that attempt to convey the basic story of the film within the film within the film. von Trier stars again in the fantasy scenes as the doctor flying over the country on a rope tied to a helicopter or discussing the meaning of life and death with a black priest who previously turned up as an eccentric cab driver (von Trier regular, Michael Simpson). The fantasy scenes are beautifully composed and photographed in lush 35mm black and white by Carl Dryer's favourite cinematographer Henning Bendtsen (who also shot the majority of Europa), which juxtaposes nicely with the high-contrast black and white 16mm footage of the real-world sequences. These sequences are a joy to watch, showing us the meticulous von Trier of The Element Of Crime, with the great majority of these brief sequences coming close to the visual poetry of filmmakers like the aforementioned Dryer, and von Trier's great hero at the time, Tarkovsky.

The real-life scenes just sort of ramble along - which is a great deal of fun if you don't find Lars and Niels too annoying as characters - as they go about writing this nonsense film that ends up spilling out into the real world in a bizarre and suitably absurd fashion. The strangest set of scenes in the whole film has to be the lengthy sequence towards the middle of the film in which the writer and director drive to Cologne to meet with the actor, Udo Kier, who, upon meeting the filmmakers, proceeds to recite an emotional monologue about his mother's death, and a secret she had kept pertaining-to his birth. Other bizarre scenes include a flashback to a moment in Niels' life, where he talks about pretending to be a teenager in order to trick a young American girl into revealing details about her home life, so that, like Kafka, he would be able to write a book about America, without actually having to go there.

The film establishes many of von Trier's cinematic preoccupations not already formed by The Element Of Crime, in particular the idealistic doctor blinded by his own arrogance, the use of medical horror (an early trip to the Kingdom hospital for Lars to observe a clandestine operation on a naked man), European devastation, questions of faith, improvisation and, last of all, hypnosis. Hypnosis was a key narrative device in all of the Europe trilogy, often used to position the audience within the mindset of the lead character... Here, however, it's used more as window dressing, as Lars and Niels invite a hypnotist and his subject to a dinner party with their financier at the Danish Film Institute so that, through hypnosis, the girl can act out the ending of their film. Here, the whole thing becomes far too surreal, as bubonic cysts break out on the guests, and Niels' wife starts vomiting blood all over the dinning room. Despite that lurid description, the use of actual hypnosis and the unbelievable horror etched onto the protagonist's face, makes it one of the most powerful scenes ever witnessed in a von Trier film (and yes... that does include the climax of Dogville, and The Idiots).

Ultimately, it's hard to really know what to think of Epidemic. Like The Element Of Crime, von Trier has since disregarded it as a post-modern parody of his cinematic hero's... then again, he also once said it was his favourite film of his own... so who knows? I personally quite like it, and I find the integration of the documentary style footage with Bendtsen's beautifully composed fantasy sequences to be quite spectacular and fairly hypnotic. At the end of the day, I'd say that this is a film for von Trier fanatics only, with everyone else probably despairing of all the self-aware references (a conversation towards the beginning about a script called "The Cop and the Whore" references The Element Of Crime) or the possibility that it's all just a silly joke.

Who cares about Lars and his buddy's writing process?

[happyreflex · 3/10 · 13 February 2009]

Lars von Trier is a genius when he actually makes a film, as he did with Element of Crime and Europa, two visually stunning films that I absolutely love. But here, von Trier does not so much tell a story as tell a story about people writing a story and then give us all-too-brief segments of that story. If von Trier had just filmed the story about the doctor who tries to cure a plague but instead ends up spreading it, we would have had another masterpiece. Indeed, the segments that tell this story are wonderful. But to get to these gems, which make up perhaps 5 percent of the movie, we have to wade through intolerable stretches of 16mm excrement. Lars and his friend think up this idea, visit this place, talk to Udo Kier, frustrate and infuriate the viewer with impossibly boring stretches of cinema verité. The experience was painful. In fact, I'll deduct some credit for pain and suffering.

A funny style exercise

[ludovic391 · 9/10 · 10 February 2006]

The idea of the film is great. Mixing the creation of a movie and his viewing. It's done in a very ambitious way, incredibly sophisticated and elegant when we know the budget who was assigned to the movie.

A lot of scenes are incredible, specially the one who shows the contamination of the priest, adding a reflection on the condition of the black man. Obviously the last scene is one of the most incredible things I've seen on a screen, but we can doubt the mental health of Von Trier and his crew. However maybe it's the reason he's so good...

I didn't like a few things. I think there is too much time about the creation of the movie, a few ridiculous and unappropriated moments as the story of the American letters of Niels

A Lars' joke

[c_mari · 1/10 · 30 May 2005]

Lars Von Trier seems to be able to make just two kind of movie: awful ones and excellent ones. Epidemic has been scheduled in order to obtain money for another movie - Lars intended to ask money for two different movies and to use almost all of the money to realize the first one (Europe), leaving few dollars to realize the second one (Epidemic). Epidemic has no script, no actors and almost no director. It's just a funny joke. It can be amusing if you are really involved with Lars, Niels, and his wife, otherwise it makes no sense. I rate one star just because it is not possible to write "rating does not apply". If you are interested in Lars Von Trier visual and poetic art, try to consider before the more recent (and in some way, more "accessible") works like "Breaking the Waves", "Dancer in the Dark", and "Dogville". "Europa" can be the following step and, if you like it, maybe "Idioterne" and "Forbrydelsens element" can be the following one. The TV series "Riget" I and II are really enjoyable and are an all-audience product - Lars said it made them just for money. Obviously, they're not a mixture of "E.R." and "Twin Peaks", as someone said. The style of "Epidemic" is very similar to that of "Riget", but the plot is meaningless. From a certain point of view, "Epidemic" is like an home made movie: it can be funny according to the ones who made it, and maybe it can be appreciated by their friends, but shouldn't be programmed on the big screen (...unless someone has given you some money to make it...)

Epidemic

[alexx668 · 8/10 · 3 November 2005]

The plot: a director and a screenwriter lose the screenplay they've been working on due to hard disk corruption and start working on another project called "Epidemic". The film follows their misadventures but in the meantime a real epidemic is starting to develop around them, but goes by unnoticed. Oh and also fragments of the film-in-a-film "Epidemic" are shown in-between. Oh and Lars Von Trier (the director) and Niels Vorsel (the screenwriter) are the protagonists playing, ahem, the director and the screenwriter. Lovely.

And if by reading this the first thought that came to your mind is "black comedy", then go to the top of the class cause you're absolutely right. The best thing about this film is how it ridicules film-making and yet somehow is a good example of artistic pompousness. But then again we know that Von Trier is a cynical little bugger. Udo Kier's cameo recalling WW2 is brilliant. Be warned though, definitely an acquired taste.

For Von Trier completists only.

[McBuff · 2/10 · 13 January 2002]

* SPOILER WARNING * Director Lars Von Trier, who stars as himself in this mock documentary meta-horror black comedy drama (!), comments early on that "a film should be a pebble in your shoe". With this, he may have accomplished just that. It´s an annoying mess of a movie, which tries to make sense in the last scene, but by then you have been subjected to tons of extraneous footage, bad dubbing, clues and a pretentious movie-within-a-movie, also called Epidemic. Von Trier and cowriter Niels Vørsel tries to finish their script and convince film institute executive Claes Kastholm to finance their movie about a mysterious plague spreading through Europe, but the epidemic seems to have started in real life as well. Or something. The chilling giallo-inspired climactic hypnosis sequence (with real life hypnotist Svend Ali Hamann) is effective, but Von Trier´s ad hoc filmmaking style will test the viewer´s patience. He does, however, make an interesting visit to the hospital, as a sort of premonition to his later hits "The Kingdom 1 + 2". Udo Kier appears briefly as himself. A box office disaster; well two, actually, if you count the vastly ignored re-release in 1997. *½

Dogma avant-la-lettre

[Camera-Obscura · 25 November 2006]

EPIDEMIC (Lars von Trier - Demark 1987).

Von Trier's second feature reveals his obsessions with cinema, with his self-imposed limitations on film-making in many ways foreshadowing Von Trier's later obstructions upon Jorgen Leth in THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003).

Essentially a film about his own obsessions, or a grand parody on horror, as some suggested. Von, Trier, frustrated by the delay of his never realized project, "The Grand Mal", about two gangster families in divided Berlin, made a bet with film consultant Claes Kastholm of the Danish Film Institute, claiming that he could make a feature film for one million Danish kroner. Resulting partly in an amateur movie about a film director and a scriptwriter who must write a new manuscript in five days, interspersed with scenes from the film they are working on - about a young idealistic doctor in the late 20th century, who tries to fight an epidemic, but only manages to spread it further. The film culminates with the outbreak of a deadly plague, not in the past but in the present. Throughout the film, Von Trier shows his fascination with Germany, for example, during a ride through the "Ruhrgebiet", the industrial core of Europe, or the world, at least during the '80s.

Camera Obscura --- 8/10

I rarely stop a movie, but I couldn't choke this one down.

[j_chy · 1/10 · 15 December 2006]

I have sat through some crappy movies, but 53 minutes in, I just don't care. The movie has found my inner apathy and it has embraced it.

It has some pretty B&W images here and there, but not enough to garner interest. Even Lemmy Caution couldn't save this stinker.

In my mind's eye I see a buxom Bugs Bunny on the back of a fat horse and Elmer Fudd in a horned helmet.

Into the mail-DVD-service (not the "red" company) return envelope it goes, unfinished, unenjoyed and rejected in favor of an hour of spider solitaire on my notebook computer. They should pay me to watch this one.

Real & Surreal: A large pebble in the shoe.

[reizamundi · 10/10 · 8 April 2022]

Epidemic is definitely one of von Trier's more mature films with an explicit portrayal of the combination of realism and surrealism with a touch of comic and ironic expression. The minimal aesthetics further attenuates von Trier's artistic visions and tremendous talent of transforming plain scenes into something emotional, beautiful, and horrific. For example, who'd known that the act of cutting open a tube of toothpaste could be so sadistic, erotic, and disturbing!

The shots of Dr. Mesmer's story are stunningly beautiful and dreamlike. Paired with one of Wagner's most brilliant compositions, I truly felt touched by an indescribable element.

The ending of the film is both humorous and shocking, leaving a large pebble and surprise in the shoe for the audiences!

A m'piece after a handful of candies..

[filizyarimcan · 1/10 · 21 May 2005]

Lars vTrier is a genius,no doubt.Everything he did,especially The Kingdom is extraordinary and very very good,shocking..but there is something that makes me feel humiliated.In Epidemic this feeling comes to its peak.It is like 'you stupid audience,watch whatever I do with your open mouth where I can put everything I want,it can be a candy or ..it'.The first I saw from him was 'Breaking the Waves' that impressed me so much that I begun waiting for the next work of the director.That was 'Dancer in the Dark'and I became a child who ate a chocolate bonbon(Danser in the Dark) after a caramelized bonbon(Breaking the Waves).In the meanwhile I found the opportunity to see Riget on the TV,this was a box filled with chocolate candies filled with caramel.Even though,all those candies were taken with no finishing,I was still a child with wide open mouth.And then 'dogville'came.Another big different candy.

After finishing 'Epidemic',I felt as if I've just eaten a big piece of ..it.Very much experimental,very much B&W,very much LvT,...But I am still with my wide open mouth,waiting to eat 'Mandelay'.it is worth risking!

Roll camera, ready, action!

[virtualimmigrant · 8/10 · 14 February 2019]

'Epidemic' is a movie that might feel like intriguing premise wasted on some pretentious art-house gimmick. On the other hand, it is very intriguing story shot in very intriguing style. The film contains three parallel stories - two screenwriters Lars and Niels struggling with their screenplay, at the same time devastating plague starts to kill people all over the Europe, and then the events happening to the characters that our writers are creating at the moment.

Wonderful experimental film about making a film.

I'd rather have the plague than sit through this again

[asda-man · 2/10 · 10 July 2018]

Christ am I regretting spending fifteen squid on this Lars Von Trier 'E Trilogy' boxset. I absolutely adore all of his other films (aside from The Idiots) but The Element of Crime proved to be a tedious exercise in style over substance and Epidemic somehow manages to be even worse.

Devoid of any style or substance, Epidemic painfully depicts the writing process of a 'horror' film between Lars and his writing partner Niels. It's an interesting meta idea but the whole thing feels chopped and forced together. The film looks messy just by looking at it with it's shoddy camerawork, grainy black and white photography and a strange 'Epidemic' watermark which remains in the corner the whole way through, like you're watching some sort of pirate copy.

It may only be 1hr 40mins but it feels longer than the extended version of Nymphomaniac. It's nonsensical and boring, I can imagine that the majority of the film was adlibbed. There are a few fantasy sequences which are shot nicely but that's about it. The ending was also intriguingly startling as we watch a woman have a never-ending hysterical turn in the style of Isabella Adjani in Possession.

Unless you're a big Lars fan who can't help but be curious about his first three features then don't bother watching either Epedemic or The Element of Crime. I can't imagine why you would anyway, although I do recall Epidemic appearing on a list of the scariest horror films. Can't understand why though, this is not a horror film and is not scary in the slightest. Skip.

A ghost is haunting Europe

[fo.lianesp · 17 January 2000]

I like Von Trier's films and this one and "The Idiots" seem to me the ones in which he achieves through both the way they are shot and the plot in itself, a high quality of personal artistic expression.

Concentrating on "Epidemic", I think the contrast between the black and white parts and the "story" is intriguing and effective, visually disturbing and helping to create the symbolic meaning the viewer could take from this movie.

To me, beyond more evident interpretations about predestination, Dreyer-like bad and evil explanations, I believe Von Trier -with the help of, for instance, bleak houses, rundown sourroundings and disease- tries to tell us that the world we're living is infected by a growing disease, living its marks in EACH ONE OF US, making Europe in general a dull and heartless place to live, a world killing us very slowly and with it our soul, our sensibility and our ability to feel. Like the final song : "we all fall down".

Against the complacency and cynism of much of the cultural expression nowadays, I think Von Trier's work is an exemple. That is why I recommend "Epidemic" to IMDB users.

The clash between the happy beginning and the cruent ending does not appeal to me. Thumb down

[alex-187 · 2/10 · 19 February 1999]

So what? Maybe we should come to the conclusion that he/she who teases evil is destined to be hit by it. But I don't like this film. I didn't like its joking evolution and disapprove the final, never-ending, gore scene where the young hypnotized girl's sufferance, a prologue to everybody else's, is depicted in a hard-hitting monologue. It reminded me of a similar scene seen in the contorted, convolved "Baby of Macon" (the film that signed the end of my love for Greenaway) and I hated it, notwithstanding the evident difference, that being a scene of external violence while this is more a self-inflicted violence scene. The only appreciable side of the film is the grainy black and white used: too few, ain't it? And as far as I found "Breaking the waves" terribly boring either, the score is 2 thumbs-down out of 2 for Von Trier.

Pure metacinema. Lars gets involved in the first person by also involving his co-writer.

[vjdino-37683 · 9/10 · 25 November 2020]

Pure metacinema. Lars gets involved in the first person by also involving his co-writer. Since his first film, Lars has tried in a provocative way to distinguish himself from his purist colleagues who have often denigrated him. As well as part of the audience. But he has always mocked himself, producing ever-changing films where he experimented with decidedly personal languages (not to mention the invention of unacceptable movements such as Dogma 95, where he seems to mock those who do not follow the rules!). In short, either you love it or hate it, no half measures, as it is in the character's strings. This second feature film whose title begins with E as the first (The Element of Crime) and the third (Europe) which gives its name to the trilogy (Europe: not a geographical place but rather a state of mind), is the one where, together to the first, he experimented more both technically, deliberately present grain using both the 16mm and 35mm format (which we will also find in the television The Kindom), and for contents, such as the exasperation in the use of metacinema that will end up in the hysterical cries of hypnotized and contaminated woman (the hypnotist is also found in the first film of the trilogy). Certain solutions that may appear bizarre, are instead the result of a deep knowledge of the history of cinema (with peace of the detractors). Above all his ideal mentor Dreyer!

You really think so, Lars?

[Dr_Coulardeau · 8/10 · 19 August 2015]

Everything gas to be minimal, and minimal is everything. Black and white of course. Minimal camera, film, format, special effects, if any. Everything has to be really happening the way you see it, or nearly that way. Because the end is not exactly that really real and realistic.

A virus destroys the scenario that was on a floppy disk of one of those first text processors from before GUIs and PCs. So Lars and Niels have five days to produce a scenario and they are no longer interested by the one they have just lost, "The cop and the whore," which would have been a remake of "Element of Crime." So they start a new scenario from scratch in five days or so. I guess the virus got into them like a gremlin into some computer and they decide to get into the description of some epidemic in modern times.

The details are not really interesting. What is important is the treatment of the subject. If you have to only show real images and situations, how can you show a modern plague on the model of Milano under attack from the Black Death in 1348, bricking up in their houses the families that were infected for them to die inside their houses and not contaminate the others. Pure egotistic selfish absurdity anyway. Those viruses were transported by rats that do not know what bricks are and they can always go through if necessary, and they were probably already out. And the virus is like Father Christmas: it can go up and down chimneys.

Then they can go in archive underground with walls totally infected with some saltpeter like ulmcers in the plaster popping up regularly. That looks like some plague too. And then they get some facts that are told about this old plague. And if you cannot really show the new modern plague, at least you can show the scenario writers writing their scenario. And you can get into their minds and listen to what they see in their mind's eye, how they see the film, the characters, etc. So there are a few cameos about that fictitious plot that ends in the most absurd way, but you'll have to discover it yourself.

To add some modern realistic flavor they have one man telling what his mother told him about the way a whole set of people were parked or packed in some hole full of water and made to die slowly by the Nazis. We can believe that, in fact we can believe any horror about the Nazis. So no problem and we have seen so many images of these horrible events that we can put such pictures on the words. The film is only showing the self-imposed torture of the man telling what his mother had told him just before dying.

And we can also send the two scenario writers on a quick trip to Germany and have some infernal vision of cables, highways, tunnels, and all those means of transportation that would be the best vectors for any epidemic in modern times. Our cars are modern rats in a way. And I will say nothing about buses, trains, planes, and what the Canadians call char-à-bancs.

And that is what Lars von Trier is doing all the time, shifting us from any period of time and any place to any other period of time and any other place. He even includes a pathology department in some hospital and a dissection to reveal some glandular tissue change, small little pea-looking globules that develop no one knows why and how. Fifteen cases yesterday, mind you. Once again we are in for a séance of grossing out. But the final one is a champion in the genre, in the style, in the ambition to make us sick.

Lars von Trier uses a trick he has already used in "Element of Crime" and that is hypnosis. If you cannot take the producer of the film who is on a quick visit to Denmark to the plague itself evoked in the 12 page scenario, or rather sketch, you can bring a woman (of course it has to be woman, don't ask me why, but it has to be a woman) who is hypnotized by a man (and it has to be a man here too, don't ask me why but it has to be a man) and she is thus projected into the epidemic film and she describes the epidemic, what she sees, to the point of catching the disease, though it happens to her after it had happened to the first scenario writer, probably Lars if it is not Niels, and she develops, like him on his arm, ulcers on her neck and she gets crazy and she punctures the ulcers with a fork and she kills herself. How's that as for a demonstration of the power of the plague, of the film seen as a contagious and killing fatal lethal deadly epidemic?

Altogether I am still not convinced as for that film technique that illustrates a famous manifesto cosigned by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Dogme 95 and the Vow of Chastity. But what I am becoming convinced of is that if you try to only give true real material facts on the screen, you are spreading around the matter necessary to psychoanalyze you, which I hate. So I won't try to see how sick Lars von Trier is. But [...]

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

A movie about making movies

[gothic_a666 · 21 April 2009]

"Epidemic" is, at its heart of hearts, a movie about making movies. As such it challenges the relation between fiction and reality. The two are not statically established realms, self contained in their clearly contained functional domains but they are dynamically interacting at all levels and at all times. The result is a movie in which the narrative structure is dual and of a meandering nature, climaxing in what could be a merge between a programmed project that involves human intellectual intervention- the movie within the movie- and the outbreak of a natural phenomenon with its catastrophic consequences- the epidemic.

Styllistically, "Epidemic" is very much a Lars Trier movie and it shows. From the apparently disconnected flow of scenes to mix of gritty realism with allegory, the director imprints his very personal mark in all elements of "Epidemic". Its very structure attests to this and the imagery reflects it in a very overt manner. "Epidemic" seems to be a playing ground of sorts in which Lars von Trier experiments as much as possible and in trying different things creates a diverse mismatch of scenes that not always work completely well together although they create an atmosphere.

As the process of coalescence between "fiction" and "reality" (this reality being, of course, fictional in itself which adds another layer of complexity and challenges the very notion of the third and fourth walls) heightens the narrative frame shrinks from the stage that is Europe to a small room. The claustrophobia of the later phase of the movie bring the full impact of the plague to the viewer's attention via a limited sample of the population that permits a personal experience of it all.

Much like Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", the plague in question is to be read on many levels and very much like the Swedish director's movie, "Epidemic" is not for everyone. Those who find it interesting, however, may have a strangely riveting experience upon watching this clearly unconventional movie that pushes many borders even if does not do so in a completely coherent manner.

Great construction

[Portis_Charles · 9/10 · 15 February 2024]

A film with an exciting construction, alternating sequences in 16mm with a lot of grain where we see Lars Von Trier and his screenwriter Niels Vørsel in their own roles trying to write a scenario called 'Epidemic', and sequences in 35mm where we see scenes from the film in question. Vertiginous mise-en-abyme and very interesting reflection on artistic creation and the way in which it influences real life. Not for everybody surely, but powerful stuff when you can get into it.

The 16mm sequences with Lars and his screenwriter are really cool and fun, it's a nice life they have there, but you get that what is making it interesting is precisely this dark project about a lethal pandemic they are working on, so it's ambiguous and complex.