Medea

There are few runs in recent cinema history more singular than Lars Von Trier from 1984 to 2000. Beginning with The Element of Crime all the way to Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier’s Europe trilogy, followed by his Golden Hearts trilogy, and then his mini-series The Kingdom, are an unmatched, high mark in modern, European filmmaking in terms of thematic boldness, visual innovation, and good old fashioned pushing the envelope. Nestled near the start of this run is the underseen and underrated adaptation of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s screenplay of Medea, made right on the heels of The Element of Crime. This intersection of the two Danish masters distills the story to its most primal essence, strips it of its choruses and divine interventions, and retranslates the setting from Greece to the Iron Age, bringing to the fore the story’s inherently gothic elements. Kirsten Olesen turns in a career best performance as the title character, and in a unique turn for him, Udo Kier as Jason gives one of the most magnetic and stoic performances of his career. Kier is one of the few actors in the world who can command the screen with his soulful eyes alone, in this case making them somehow seem permanently transfixed in a thousand-yard stare. Watching the horror as it unfolds. The film succeeds at being an homage to Dreyer while still standing on its own as a fitting addition to Von Trier’s catalogue. He once said “My films are about ideals that clash with the world. Every time it’s a man in the lead, they have forgotten about the ideals. And every time it’s a woman in the lead, they take the ideals all the way.”  When one considers that, Medea seems like obvious subject matter for Lars Von Trier, and what could sum up his filmography better than Medea’s words in the original text by Euripides: “Who can stop grief’s avalanche once it starts to roll?”