Plot
Oilman Jan is paralyzed in an accident. His wife, who prayed for his return, feels guilty; even more, when Jan urges her to have sex with another.

Release Year: 1996

Rating: 7.8/10 (28,051 voted)

Critic's Score: 76/100

Director: Lars von Trier

Stars: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin Cartlidge

Storyline
Drama set in a repressed, deeply religious community in the north of Scotland, where a naive young woman named Bess McNeil meets and falls in love with Danish oil-rig worker Jan. Bess and Jan are deeply in love but, when Jan returns to his rig, Bess prays to God that he returns for good. Jan does return, his neck broken in an accident aboard the rig. Because of his condition, Jan and Bess are now unable to enjoy a sexual relationship and Jan urges Bess to take another lover and tell him the details. As Bess becomes more and more deviant in her sexual behavior, the more she comes to believe that her actions are guided by God and are helping Jan recover.

Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen

Cast:
Emily Watson - Bess McNeill
Stellan Skarsgård - Jan Nyman
Katrin Cartlidge - Dodo McNeill
Jean-Marc Barr - Terry
Adrian Rawlins - Dr. Richardson
Jonathan Hackett - Priest
Sandra Voe - Mother
Udo Kier - Sadistic Sailor
Mikkel Gaup - Pits
Roef Ragas - Pim
Phil McCall - Grandfather
Robert Robertson - Chairman
Desmond Reilly - An Elder
Sarah Gudgeon - Sybilla
Finlay Welsh - Coroner (as Finley Welsh)

Taglines: Love is a mighty power.

Release Date: 13 November 1996

Filming Locations: Copenhagen, Denmark

Gross: $4,040,691 (USA) (4 May 1997)

Runtime: 159 min  | USA: 153 min (director's cut)

Trivia:
Barbara Sukowa was attached to this project at one stage.

Goofs:
Continuity: (At 01:07) When Bess is in bed with her sister-in-law, the blanket is on, then off, Bess' shoulder.

Quotes:
Jan Nyman: [he writes in a paper] Let me die. I'm evil in head!
Jan Nyman: I love you no matter what is in your head!

Unforgettable

Rating:

Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves is the kind of film that makes me proud to be a film-goer and exceeds anything I could have possibly expected from the man who made Element of Crime. That film had some clever experimentation (and so does this one) but this film is the kind that's beauty and power echoes in your mind hours after you've watched it. This is a flabbergasting work of art that portrays a woman's quest to please God and does so with the complexity and emotional power of a Bergman film (not to mention the fact that the film portrays a woman's intense suffering in world sternly ruled by men with the power of a Dreyer film). If von Trier made nothing else of any merit for the rest of his career, if all he did was make marginally interesting film experiments, I wouldn't hesitate to call him a great filmmaker on the soul basis of this film. Anyway, you get the picture… The film stars Emily Watson as Bess, a shy and neurotic girl who is filled with joy to be with her new husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgard who is exceptional). When Jan is paralyzed after an accident at the oilrig he works in, he is in danger of losing his life. He convinces Bess to see other people and Bess wants nothing more than to make him happy and to prove to God that she loves him. After some disastrous complications, Bess is led to believe that she can please God and save Jan's life by having numerous sexual encounters with strangers in town. This sounds like a grungy tale, but von Trier tells it with such humanism and focus on his themes that we never feel like he is rubbing our faces in drear. And Watson is delightful, frightening, and heartbreaking as a woman who will stop at nothing to please those around her. Her one-sided conversations with God (in which she looks up in the air submissively and pleas and then looks down with a deep voice of wrath and scolds) are both funny and sad, not to mention the fact that they reveal seemingly endless amounts of details about who she is. The film is made with a hand-held camera and a visually stunning solarized style. This style does not make the movie; it just adds richness to each scene in the way it gives each face such shadowy texture. In the end, von Trier seems to believe in God but does not believe in the churches that try to codify what he wants. All of this works because of von Trier's passionate desire to understand how one can please God under horrendous terms; the epilogue, that takes the already-great material to a new level and shows how inspired von Trier is, starts with a moment of sad irony and then leaps to the skies with an image that fills the most atheistic person with questions and the more religiously spiritual people with hope. Here is a film that reaches for the stars and makes it there.

Comments: