Breaking the Waves
Lars von Trier
This film has no current screenings
Lars von Trier established his reputation as one of the most exciting—and provocative—filmmakers on the planet with this megaton meditation on faith, sexuality, and redemption. In a revelatory, Oscar-nominated performance, Emily Watson plays Bess, a troubled, zealously religious young woman living in the Scottish Highlands for whom sex with strangers becomes a twisted path to spiritual salvation after an accident paralyzes her oil-rig-worker husband (Stellan Skarsgård). Beneath the eyebrow-raising conceit is a profound humanist heart that yields, in the stunning climax, a moment of cinematic grace evoking none other than von Trier’s filmmaking idol, Carl Theodor Dreyer.