User reviews

I obviously was in the right mood, since I don't give it a horrible mark. I do give it a 6 out of 10, because it is obviously such a low budget movie and it's definitely very original, but other than that, I am still amazed I watched it till the end.

Two screenwriters are trying to do in 5 days what they barely succeeded in one and a half years, that is write a script. They lost their original screenplay, which by now they can barely remember how it started, due to a bad disk. Each day is accompanied with scenes of their creative process, scenes from the movie they would do and dialogues with different people.

Now it happens that I've just written an IMDb comment that said "Funny little things: Udo Kier plays a short role in this movie, and he is really young". Deja vu! Udo Kier plays in this one, as well.

The movie is shot in black and white, probably by the same single camera, and the sound is almost not processed giving the whole movie a documentary like feeling. There are a lot of things written between the lines, the satire of the government and film industry being the most obvious.

Conclusion: you should watch this mostly if you're Danish. Else if you are a movie critic or deep into films. It is NOT a horror movie. A movie that has some gore at the very end is not horror. And also you have to have the right set of mind to watch it.

In Epidemic two story lines play out simultaneously with both reaching the same, inevitable conclusion. The first storyline is shot in documentary style and follows screenwriters Lars & Niels while they write a script called Epidemic. The second storyline is a lushly photographed production of the film that the characters are writing.

Epidemic is about the process of creation. The screenwriters begin as idealists - their vision is pure and remains so as long as the creation is contained. Once the creation/script/disease is introduced/unleashed to the world it becomes both an object to be corrupted as well as a force which corrupts.

It all ends, as any von Trier movie should, with a suffering woman and this one's a little heavy handed even by von Trier's standards. Gitte's hypnotically induced wig-out is an obvious foreshadowing of everyone's demise and although it is difficult to watch her deterioration she is quite a site to behold.

It is fitting that the most accurate and succinct description of a Lars von Trier film should come from the man himself and it is in Epidemic that he famously proclaims, "a film should be like a pebble in your shoe." And so it is.

Another entry in my search to see a bunch of films about disease outbreaks, "Epidemic" is conceptually intriguing, but the actual execution is dreadful. It's amateurish, and Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel, scenarists within and without the film, seem to have approached the entire thing as a joke; the end result being that the film itself is one. And, for crying out loud, take that damn red watermark of a title off the screen already! Seriously, the title, "Epidemic," along with an e in a circle, is in the upper left side of the image for most of the picture--and in red in an otherwise black-and-white film. I thought there was something wrong with the DVD or my home-viewing equipment--I'm still not entirely sure, because it makes no sense why the title would remain there for the rest of the whole movie. The lousy lighting and noisy photography, from what mostly seems to be 16mm film, is rather a blessing in this regard, as it sometimes obscures the ever present title in indiscernible darkness. Besides that, I also wanted to smack the smirks off their faces most of the time. Stop laughing, guys; none of this is amusing except, perhaps, for part of the ending. Aside from the Grand Guignol, my favorite part has the screenwriters' boss deploring the two's lack of a full script, for which they were hired, and deploring their film's ending, which he says is "pathetic" at best.

What there is is a skeleton of a script and a plotline painted on a wall. Literally, this is what is shown in the film for the writing of the film-within-the-film, also titled "Epidemic," and it's believable that's all they really did write for this entire film. I believe they mention this lack of planning in the DVD commentary, on which the two otherwise spend most of the time giggling at themselves giggling in the stupid movie. It's obnoxious. Hard to believe one of them, von Trier, went on to be the most famous Scandinavian filmmaker since Ingmar Bergman. Regardless, the premise of the thing was promising, of the film-within-the-film infecting the outer narrative--the movie as monster, as the source of the epidemic--as the writers in the outer one have likewise been infecting the inner film. These sort of meta narratives are catnip to me, so one needs to go out of their way or, rather in this case, not go out of their way at all, to dissuade me of it.

The film even begins with what seems to have been a waste of a good pun by not making clear that their script is lost to some sort of computer "virus," with the other sort of virus deadly to people occupying the film they decide to write after losing their previous effort, which apparently was so bad they can't even remember it so as to re-write the thing. From there, we get a shaggy-dog story--like the first car ride that goes nowhere, as do several of the film's other rambling detours. The texting while driving gag--with a typewriter (this being 1987) isn't bad. At least Udo Kier's scene is an interesting telling of his birthday, too, but otherwise we get pretentious wine tasting, a story of Vørsel's creepy correspondence with teenage girls from Atlantic City, and a woman hypnotized into the film-within-the-film who bawls and screams over how awful "Epidemic" is. I didn't think it was that bad, but it was a chore to finish it.

Epidemic appears to be all stylistic self-indulgence. It is filmed in black and white, with often purposely redundant subtitles. Each shot is very very long. Some are stoic, some are suddenly goofy, some are disturbing, mostly stoic. When there is dialogue, it is intellectually stimulating, but borderline irrelevant.

Mainly, it is that director Lars Von Trier and his screenplay collaborator Niels Vorsel play themselves, coming up with a last-minute script for a producer. This strand takes disproportionate turns with scenes from their script, in which Von Trier plays a radical doctor attempting to cure a modern-day epidemic. In an warped turn, the doctor finds that he himself has been spreading it. For so long, one is left without a clue as to why there is such a coincidence between the screenplay and the outside world, or any progressions of the different narrative strands' signifying signs. But it infects you. It burns you.

Whether or not the film is narcissistic, it is not form over function. Essentially, it is a basic exercise in what metaphysically affects the viewer. Consider the scene of the darker, quieter of the screenwriters in the subway, knowing predeterminately that the other one is going to die. Or when he looks in a mirror, turns to us, the camera, then the mirror again. Everything one expects would create a cohesive, sense-making narrative film is inverted and indeed develops an immediately conscious connection between itself and the audience.

That is not to say it eschews any fundamental aspect of quality. Udo Kier delivers one of the most amazing, fantastic performances I have ever seen. Really, many of the performances, whoever these actors, or characters, are, shock and deeply move us. Some scenes are entirely made up of uproarious laughter or breakdowns of screaming, in spite of the unapologetic stoicism and quiet permeating the film.

This hypnotic abstraction is truly very atmospheric and creepy. It is a transcendental, almost physiologically affecting virus that infests you for days upon being subjected to it. It is something that has to be seen and can hardly be explained. And that makes it a true work of art.

Epidemic sounded like it had an interesting concept when I got it from Netflix. The film follows the parallel stories of two screenwriters writing a script about a plague even as an epidemic breaks out around them, and scenes from the film they are writing. Leave it to Danish auteur Lars von Trier to ruin what could have been an extremely interesting movie.

The film's problem is that it has no real plot per se, just a series of unrelated images that fail to coalesce into a unified film. Large parts of the film seem to meander with no relevance to the rest of the film. At one point, the film pauses for five minutes to discuss the diseases that plague vineyards. Lars, we're here for the human epidemic, not to hear about noble rot!

Furthermore, the film is ugly looking for the most part, shot in a grainy black and white. Although this works in a scene where they are going through a lighted tunnel, it is overall annoying. Having the title up on screen for almost the entire picture was also distracting.

There are a few interesting scenes, such as a bit with Udo Kier, but it is not enough. Only at the end does the film achieve a disturbing quality with a genuinely haunting finale. By this point, however, it's too late. The viewer has lost interest and feels that his or her time has been wasted.

Of course, you gotta be a masochist to enjoy some people's genius - you know that if you bear with them they will take you to new levels of perception.

With Lars von Trier, the voyage is often hilarious. Epidemic is funny. Funny, in a Gummo kind of way: the characters are real, reality is eerie, and we laugh to break the tension; funny in a the characters say amusing things kind of way (preacher: "this bible is in goddamned Latin"); and funny in an Andy Kaufman screwing with the audience (yes, you) kind of way.

Make no mistake: you will suffer. If you are afraid, stay away from horror movies, ya pansy!

This movie also features some great aesthetic distance! It's bold!

Lars von Trier is a genius when he actually makes a film, as he did with Element of Crime and Europa, two visually stunning films that I absolutely love. But here, von Trier does not so much tell a story as tell a story about people writing a story and then give us all-too-brief segments of that story. If von Trier had just filmed the story about the doctor who tries to cure a plague but instead ends up spreading it, we would have had another masterpiece. Indeed, the segments that tell this story are wonderful. But to get to these gems, which make up perhaps 5 percent of the movie, we have to wade through intolerable stretches of 16mm excrement. Lars and his friend think up this idea, visit this place, talk to Udo Kier, frustrate and infuriate the viewer with impossibly boring stretches of cinema verité. The experience was painful. In fact, I'll deduct some credit for pain and suffering.

Lars Von Trier seems to be able to make just two kind of movie: awful ones and excellent ones. Epidemic has been scheduled in order to obtain money for another movie - Lars intended to ask money for two different movies and to use almost all of the money to realize the first one (Europe), leaving few dollars to realize the second one (Epidemic). Epidemic has no script, no actors and almost no director. It's just a funny joke. It can be amusing if you are really involved with Lars, Niels, and his wife, otherwise it makes no sense. I rate one star just because it is not possible to write "rating does not apply". If you are interested in Lars Von Trier visual and poetic art, try to consider before the more recent (and in some way, more "accessible") works like "Breaking the Waves", "Dancer in the Dark", and "Dogville". "Europa" can be the following step and, if you like it, maybe "Idioterne" and "Forbrydelsens element" can be the following one. The TV series "Riget" I and II are really enjoyable and are an all-audience product - Lars said it made them just for money. Obviously, they're not a mixture of "E.R." and "Twin Peaks", as someone said. The style of "Epidemic" is very similar to that of "Riget", but the plot is meaningless. From a certain point of view, "Epidemic" is like an home made movie: it can be funny according to the ones who made it, and maybe it can be appreciated by their friends, but shouldn't be programmed on the big screen (...unless someone has given you some money to make it...)

The idea of the film is great. Mixing the creation of a movie and his viewing. It's done in a very ambitious way, incredibly sophisticated and elegant when we know the budget who was assigned to the movie.

A lot of scenes are incredible, specially the one who shows the contamination of the priest, adding a reflection on the condition of the black man. Obviously the last scene is one of the most incredible things I've seen on a screen, but we can doubt the mental health of Von Trier and his crew. However maybe it's the reason he's so good...

I didn't like a few things. I think there is too much time about the creation of the movie, a few ridiculous and unappropriated moments as the story of the American letters of Niels

I have sat through some crappy movies, but 53 minutes in, I just don't care. The movie has found my inner apathy and it has embraced it.

It has some pretty B&W images here and there, but not enough to garner interest. Even Lemmy Caution couldn't save this stinker.

In my mind's eye I see a buxom Bugs Bunny on the back of a fat horse and Elmer Fudd in a horned helmet.

Into the mail-DVD-service (not the "red" company) return envelope it goes, unfinished, unenjoyed and rejected in favor of an hour of spider solitaire on my notebook computer. They should pay me to watch this one.

Lars vTrier is a genius,no doubt.Everything he did,especially The Kingdom is extraordinary and very very good,shocking..but there is something that makes me feel humiliated.In Epidemic this feeling comes to its peak.It is like 'you stupid audience,watch whatever I do with your open mouth where I can put everything I want,it can be a candy or ..it'.The first I saw from him was 'Breaking the Waves' that impressed me so much that I begun waiting for the next work of the director.That was 'Dancer in the Dark'and I became a child who ate a chocolate bonbon(Danser in the Dark) after a caramelized bonbon(Breaking the Waves).In the meanwhile I found the opportunity to see Riget on the TV,this was a box filled with chocolate candies filled with caramel.Even though,all those candies were taken with no finishing,I was still a child with wide open mouth.And then 'dogville'came.Another big different candy.

After finishing 'Epidemic',I felt as if I've just eaten a big piece of ..it.Very much experimental,very much B&W,very much LvT,...But I am still with my wide open mouth,waiting to eat 'Mandelay'.it is worth risking!

EPIDEMIC (Lars von Trier - Demark 1987).

Von Trier's second feature reveals his obsessions with cinema, with his self-imposed limitations on film-making in many ways foreshadowing Von Trier's later obstructions upon Jorgen Leth in THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003).

Essentially a film about his own obsessions, or a grand parody on horror, as some suggested. Von, Trier, frustrated by the delay of his never realized project, "The Grand Mal", about two gangster families in divided Berlin, made a bet with film consultant Claes Kastholm of the Danish Film Institute, claiming that he could make a feature film for one million Danish kroner. Resulting partly in an amateur movie about a film director and a scriptwriter who must write a new manuscript in five days, interspersed with scenes from the film they are working on - about a young idealistic doctor in the late 20th century, who tries to fight an epidemic, but only manages to spread it further. The film culminates with the outbreak of a deadly plague, not in the past but in the present. Throughout the film, Von Trier shows his fascination with Germany, for example, during a ride through the "Ruhrgebiet", the industrial core of Europe, or the world, at least during the '80s.

Camera Obscura --- 8/10

Christ am I regretting spending fifteen squid on this Lars Von Trier 'E Trilogy' boxset. I absolutely adore all of his other films (aside from The Idiots) but The Element of Crime proved to be a tedious exercise in style over substance and Epidemic somehow manages to be even worse.

Devoid of any style or substance, Epidemic painfully depicts the writing process of a 'horror' film between Lars and his writing partner Niels. It's an interesting meta idea but the whole thing feels chopped and forced together. The film looks messy just by looking at it with it's shoddy camerawork, grainy black and white photography and a strange 'Epidemic' watermark which remains in the corner the whole way through, like you're watching some sort of pirate copy.

It may only be 1hr 40mins but it feels longer than the extended version of Nymphomaniac. It's nonsensical and boring, I can imagine that the majority of the film was adlibbed. There are a few fantasy sequences which are shot nicely but that's about it. The ending was also intriguingly startling as we watch a woman have a never-ending hysterical turn in the style of Isabella Adjani in Possession.

Unless you're a big Lars fan who can't help but be curious about his first three features then don't bother watching either Epedemic or The Element of Crime. I can't imagine why you would anyway, although I do recall Epidemic appearing on a list of the scariest horror films. Can't understand why though, this is not a horror film and is not scary in the slightest. Skip.

So what? Maybe we should come to the conclusion that he/she who teases evil is destined to be hit by it. But I don't like this film. I didn't like its joking evolution and disapprove the final, never-ending, gore scene where the young hypnotized girl's sufferance, a prologue to everybody else's, is depicted in a hard-hitting monologue. It reminded me of a similar scene seen in the contorted, convolved "Baby of Macon" (the film that signed the end of my love for Greenaway) and I hated it, notwithstanding the evident difference, that being a scene of external violence while this is more a self-inflicted violence scene. The only appreciable side of the film is the grainy black and white used: too few, ain't it? And as far as I found "Breaking the waves" terribly boring either, the score is 2 thumbs-down out of 2 for Von Trier.

Epidemic is definitely one of von Trier's more mature films with an explicit portrayal of the combination of realism and surrealism with a touch of comic and ironic expression. The minimal aesthetics further attenuates von Trier's artistic visions and tremendous talent of transforming plain scenes into something emotional, beautiful, and horrific. For example, who'd known that the act of cutting open a tube of toothpaste could be so sadistic, erotic, and disturbing!

The shots of Dr. Mesmer's story are stunningly beautiful and dreamlike. Paired with one of Wagner's most brilliant compositions, I truly felt touched by an indescribable element.

The ending of the film is both humorous and shocking, leaving a large pebble and surprise in the shoe for the audiences!

'Epidemic' is a movie that might feel like intriguing premise wasted on some pretentious art-house gimmick. On the other hand, it is very intriguing story shot in very intriguing style. The film contains three parallel stories - two screenwriters Lars and Niels struggling with their screenplay, at the same time devastating plague starts to kill people all over the Europe, and then the events happening to the characters that our writers are creating at the moment.

Wonderful experimental film about making a film.

I like Von Trier's films and this one and "The Idiots" seem to me the ones in which he achieves through both the way they are shot and the plot in itself, a high quality of personal artistic expression.

Concentrating on "Epidemic", I think the contrast between the black and white parts and the "story" is intriguing and effective, visually disturbing and helping to create the symbolic meaning the viewer could take from this movie.

To me, beyond more evident interpretations about predestination, Dreyer-like bad and evil explanations, I believe Von Trier -with the help of, for instance, bleak houses, rundown sourroundings and disease- tries to tell us that the world we're living is infected by a growing disease, living its marks in EACH ONE OF US, making Europe in general a dull and heartless place to live, a world killing us very slowly and with it our soul, our sensibility and our ability to feel. Like the final song : "we all fall down".

Against the complacency and cynism of much of the cultural expression nowadays, I think Von Trier's work is an exemple. That is why I recommend "Epidemic" to IMDB users.

Pure metacinema. Lars gets involved in the first person by also involving his co-writer. Since his first film, Lars has tried in a provocative way to distinguish himself from his purist colleagues who have often denigrated him. As well as part of the audience. But he has always mocked himself, producing ever-changing films where he experimented with decidedly personal languages (not to mention the invention of unacceptable movements such as Dogma 95, where he seems to mock those who do not follow the rules!). In short, either you love it or hate it, no half measures, as it is in the character's strings. This second feature film whose title begins with E as the first (The Element of Crime) and the third (Europe) which gives its name to the trilogy (Europe: not a geographical place but rather a state of mind), is the one where, together to the first, he experimented more both technically, deliberately present grain using both the 16mm and 35mm format (which we will also find in the television The Kindom), and for contents, such as the exasperation in the use of metacinema that will end up in the hysterical cries of hypnotized and contaminated woman (the hypnotist is also found in the first film of the trilogy). Certain solutions that may appear bizarre, are instead the result of a deep knowledge of the history of cinema (with peace of the detractors). Above all his ideal mentor Dreyer!

"Epidemic" is, at its heart of hearts, a movie about making movies. As such it challenges the relation between fiction and reality. The two are not statically established realms, self contained in their clearly contained functional domains but they are dynamically interacting at all levels and at all times. The result is a movie in which the narrative structure is dual and of a meandering nature, climaxing in what could be a merge between a programmed project that involves human intellectual intervention- the movie within the movie- and the outbreak of a natural phenomenon with its catastrophic consequences- the epidemic.

Styllistically, "Epidemic" is very much a Lars Trier movie and it shows. From the apparently disconnected flow of scenes to mix of gritty realism with allegory, the director imprints his very personal mark in all elements of "Epidemic". Its very structure attests to this and the imagery reflects it in a very overt manner. "Epidemic" seems to be a playing ground of sorts in which Lars von Trier experiments as much as possible and in trying different things creates a diverse mismatch of scenes that not always work completely well together although they create an atmosphere.

As the process of coalescence between "fiction" and "reality" (this reality being, of course, fictional in itself which adds another layer of complexity and challenges the very notion of the third and fourth walls) heightens the narrative frame shrinks from the stage that is Europe to a small room. The claustrophobia of the later phase of the movie bring the full impact of the plague to the viewer's attention via a limited sample of the population that permits a personal experience of it all.

Much like Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", the plague in question is to be read on many levels and very much like the Swedish director's movie, "Epidemic" is not for everyone. Those who find it interesting, however, may have a strangely riveting experience upon watching this clearly unconventional movie that pushes many borders even if does not do so in a completely coherent manner.

A film with an exciting construction, alternating sequences in 16mm with a lot of grain where we see Lars Von Trier and his screenwriter Niels Vørsel in their own roles trying to write a scenario called 'Epidemic', and sequences in 35mm where we see scenes from the film in question. Vertiginous mise-en-abyme and very interesting reflection on artistic creation and the way in which it influences real life. Not for everybody surely, but powerful stuff when you can get into it.

The 16mm sequences with Lars and his screenwriter are really cool and fun, it's a nice life they have there, but you get that what is making it interesting is precisely this dark project about a lethal pandemic they are working on, so it's ambiguous and complex.