Epidemic (1987) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Lars von Trier
Writers: Lars von Trier (screenplay), Niels Vørsel (screenplay)
Stars: Allan De Waal, Ole Ernst, Michael Gelting

Lars von Trier’s Europe Trilogy
With his dazzling first three features, Lars von Trier sought nothing less than to map the soul of Europe—its troubled past, anxious present, and uncertain future. Linked by a fascination with hypnotic states and the mesmeric possibilities of cinema, the films that make up the Europe Trilogy—The Element of Crime, Epidemic, and Europa—filter the continent’s turbulent history, guilt, and traumas through the Danish provocateur’s audacious deconstructions of genres including film noir, melodrama, horror, and science fiction. Above all, they are bravura showcases for von Trier’s hallucinatory visuals, with each shot a tour de force of technical invention and dark imagination.

A jet-black comedy of contagion, a subversive medical-horror freak-out, and a sly metacinematic prank, Lars von Trier’s sophomore feature—born from a bet that he couldn’t make a film for less than $150,000—finds the director channeling his singular thematic obsessions into an evocatively lo-fi, perversely self-reflexive provocation. The filmmaker himself stars as a harried screenwriter whose efforts to complete a script about the outbreak of a deadly disease coincide with a grisly real-life plague. A twisted reflection on Europe’s haunted past—from the Black Death to World War II—and its scarred present, Epidemic is von Trier at his most idiosyncratic and audaciously experimental.

Extras:
- 3K digital restoration, approved by director Lars von Trier, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring von Trier and screenwriter and actor Niels Vørsel
- From Dreyer to von Trier, a 2005 interview with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen
- Program featuring interviews with Vørsel, film scholar Peter Schepelern, cinematographer Kristoffer Nyholm, actors Udo Kier and Michael Simpson, and film consultant Claes Kastholm Hansen
- Danish television interview with von Trier from 1991
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing