Art-house schlock from Danish director Lars von Trier, sort of Ingmar Bergman meets Rob Zombie, or in other words scab-picker gone full-bore mutilator. It tells of a grieving couple who repair to a lonely cabin in the Northwest woods — a spot Biblically, ironically, caustically called Eden — to work out their feelings after the death of their toddler, the unhinged wife expressing hers more uninhibitedly while the rational husband, a therapist by trade, suffers under a professional obligation to tolerate abuse, attack, recrimination: "You're indifferent to whether your child is alive or dead." The black-and-white slow-motion prologue shows how the tot went out the window in his pj's when his parents were selfishly making whoopee in the shower, including a single cuttable shot of hardcore penetration, the sort of shot that got inserted into "R"-rated films circa 1973 to convert them in a twinkling into the newly allowable "XXX." This, although we have no reason to believe that Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe were within the same time zone when it was filmed, puts us on notice that anything goes. Not much goes for the next long while, however, as the alerted and anxious spectator has to make do with a sickly green image, an unsteady camera, a forest of symbols (phallic, vaginal, vegetal, putrescent), and an actual primeval forest ("Nature is Satan's church"), before finally coming to the main course of the evening, something to transform the filmgoer's jaded palate into a nauseated palate, with gruesome damage done to prosthetic genitals of both sexes. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd