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Epidemic

1988, Movie, NR, 106 mins

Epidemic: Review

EPIDEMIC
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The shadow of David Cronenberg's earliest body-horror films looms over Danish director/co-writer Lars von Trier's coolly self-referential, self-destructing horror picture. Screenwriters Lars (von Trier) and Niels (co-writer Niels Vorsel) are supposed to deliver their screenplay, "The Cop and the Whore," to producer Claes (Claes Kastholm Hansen) when he returns from Arizona in five days' time. But they've accidentally erased the only disc and can't recreate the story — neither even really liked it, they quickly admit. So they start work on a treatment for a horror tale called "Epidemic" and, inspired by their research into the horrors of bubonic plague, imagine a mysterious, incurable illness which wreaks havoc. In an awful confluence of fact and fiction, a voice-over narrator informs viewers, a real epidemic was approaching while Niels and Lars devised their scenario, and its outbreak coincided with the treatment's completion. As the five days unfold, culminating in the dinner party at which they hope to persuade Claes to accept "Epidemic" as a substitute for "The Cop and the Whore," sequences from "Epidemic" alternate with real-world scenes. As D.I.N. spreads, a sinister cabal of doctors takes refuge in the basement of an art museum, where they search for a cure and plot to assume control of the government. One idealist, Dr. Mesmer (von Trier) goes out to try and treat the sick, ironically spreading the disease further. In keeping with his generally perverse filmmaking aesthetic, von Trier systematically does everything he can to alienate horror enthusiasts. He piles on mundane scenes of Niels' wife (Susanne Ottesen) planning the dinner party; includes a long sequence in which Udo Kier, playing himself, relates to Lars and Niels a WWII incident told to him by his late mother; and reveals the story's conclusion at the beginning. He even undermines his own story's apparent thematic underpinnings: Lest you imagine that Niels and Lars somehow imagined the real plague into being, forget it — the killjoy narrator says it's just a dreadful coincidence. The scenes from "Epidemic" have the high-contrast look of a 1920s horror film, are in English (much of it badly dubbed) and feature images that are handsome and preposterous in equal parts — they're amusing, and too stylized to be disturbing. It's a must-see, however, for von Trier completists, if only for the way certain sequences look forward to his chilling THE KINGDOM (1994) and THE KINGDOM, PART II (1997). leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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