Curator Watchlist
A bleak, confrontational second half that pushes the first film’s confessional structure into harsher, more punitive territory. It has striking performances and a sharp, provocative formal intelligence, but the tonal cruelty and narrative choices will alienate many viewers.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 4m
Director: Lars von Trier
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin
The continuation of Joe's sexually dictated life delves into the darker aspects of her adult life and what led to her being in Seligman's care.
Lars von Trier
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin
A bleak, confrontational second half that pushes the first film’s confessional structure into harsher, more punitive territory. It has striking performances and a sharp, provocative formal intelligence, but the tonal cruelty and narrative choices will alienate many viewers.
This volume doubles down on the project’s most divisive qualities: confession as performance, sex as pathology, and storytelling as a trap. It is less playful than the first film and far more severe, with Joe’s life becoming a grim anatomy of compulsion, damage, and self-mythologizing. The result is often fascinating, but also exhausting and intentionally abrasive.
What keeps it alive is the tension between its intellectual design and its emotional ugliness. The film is full of formal wit, literary digressions, and a coldly controlled sense of structure, yet it repeatedly undercuts any chance of comfort. That friction is the point, but it also means the movie can feel like a dare rather than an invitation.
For viewers willing to meet it on those terms, there is real craft here and a memorable central performance. For everyone else, it may feel like a punishing extension of a provocation that has already said its piece.
H (4★) · 2929 likes
The ending was so stupid. The guy was a very supporting charater during her story. He shows consideration and empathy throughout the whole story. It didnt make sense his behavior at the end. It ruins the film as a whole for me.
mia (3★) · 2548 likes
thinking about how shia labeouf got his role because he sent lars von trier his sex tape... that man is insane
Kairit (5★) · 2531 likes
all men are the same
maria (3★) · 1820 likes
lars von trier, you overgrown cockhair, i'm coming for you bitch
Jizzmonkey (3★) · 1390 likes
It's disappointing there are no fly-fishing tips in Volume 2.
Shares the same director’s fascination with grief, bodily suffering, and provocation pushed to an extreme.
A similarly severe, visually controlled drama about psychic collapse and emotional numbness.
Another austere, confrontational moral fable that turns cruelty into a formal system.
Explores female suffering, desire, and spiritual punishment with raw intensity.
A devastating psychosexual character study about repression, humiliation, and desire.
A sexually charged European drama that mixes intimacy, politics, and self-conscious cinephilia.
An infamous, stripped-down road movie centered on grief, sex, and emotional vacancy.
For viewers drawn to formally daring, brutal cinema that tests endurance and moral response.
A more playful but still taboo-minded exploration of desire, submission, and identity.
A period drama about erotic obsession and the costs of desire, with a similarly severe edge.
A stylized study of erotic ritual, power exchange, and the emotional mechanics of desire.
A sensual, twisty story about manipulation, desire, and shifting power dynamics.
sexual compulsion, confession and storytelling, female desire and shame, trauma and degradation, moral hypocrisy, self-mythology, power and exploitation, alienation
art-house drama, psychosexual, transgressive, provocative, bleak, chaptered narrative, European cinema, moral ambiguity, trauma, controversial