April 11: Upsetting — What movie upsets you? Write about it and share it.

While I was watching this movie, my wife came downstairs, upset about our neighbor and the way he leaves garbage all over the street. In the middle of being upset that I don’t want to fight the guy, she looked at the screen and saw a moment of this movie and yelled, “Why are you watching something like that?”

I answered, “You know, I have no idea.”

He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) make love as their child climbs out of a window and falls to his death. She goes to pieces and he thinks that as a therapist, he can do a better job of healing her than all the doctors and takes her to a cabin called Eden, because she’s afraid of nature and he’s into exposure therapy and man, minutes into this movie I’m already upset between the fox tearing itself apart yelling “Chaos reigns!” and the deer with a stillborn baby sticking out of it.

Well, it’s going to get worse.

He and she have violent sex at the base of a tree after he learns that she thinks all women are evil and her greatest fear is Satan. Oh yeah — she’d also been putting their son’s shoes on the wrong feet to make him deformed, which she follows up by dropping a wood block right on He’s cock then — spoilers for those of delicate constitutions — jerks him off until he sprays blood, then bolts his leg into a grindstone. She follows that up by burying him and — are you still here? — cutting off her clitoris, which was the exact moment my wife decided to look at this movie.

Lars Von Trier started writing this when he was hospitalized for depression and obviously, he was working through some horrifying things. I mean, when people are visited by despair, grief and pain before a husband strangles his wife, burns her and then is faced by hundreds of women with blurred faces, there’s a lot there. Also: he has converted to being Catholic and man, these are the kind of images that being part of the church can give you.

John Waters had the best review of this movie: “If Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide, gone to hell, and come back to earth to direct an exploitation/art film for drive-ins, this is the movie he would have made.”

You can watch this on Tubi.