Lack of good storyline.

just watch it!

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

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.

The plot: a director and a screenwriter lose the screenplay they've been working on due to hard disk corruption and start working on another project called "Epidemic". The film follows their misadventures but in the meantime a real epidemic is starting to develop around them, but goes by unnoticed. Oh and also fragments of the film-in-a-film "Epidemic" are shown in-between. Oh and Lars Von Trier (the director) and Niels Vorsel (the screenwriter) are the protagonists playing, ahem, the director and the screenwriter. Lovely.And if by reading this the first thought that came to your mind is "black comedy", then go to the top of the class cause you're absolutely right. The best thing about this film is how it ridicules film-making and yet somehow is a good example of artistic pompousness. But then again we know that Von Trier is a cynical little bugger. Udo Kier's cameo recalling WW2 is brilliant. Be warned though, definitely an acquired taste.

(Possible spoilers ahead)This one could be interpreted NOT as a horror movie. Neither as a movie-within-the-movie. In fact, it is a documentary on the creation of a movie, amidst budget constraints. The very fact that the title name appears on every still is an indication that the "disease" is nothing more but the movie itself. The `doctor' character (v.Trier) that leaves the den and then spreads the disease is probably a metaphor for the `director' character (v.Trier again) who sets out on his effort to complete a movie. The movie -or the making of it- then "infects" the people/viewers through the journey of the crew to Germany.Take this with a grain of salt, but the funding conversation in the end looks like a tongue-in-cheek attempt to prove v.Trier's ability of completing a movie; without help from the Danish Film Institute. On the artistic side: the adlibed dialogues and the free-style shooting (Dogma95 waiting to happen); the use of two different formats and some really inspired, creepy scenes. Don't search for any great acting here though...Add a cameo appearance by -godlike- Udo Kier, where he tells the autobiographical story of his eventful birth. Plus the terrifying sounds (the Anton Karas kind of zither discomfort) and a Wagner touch.Overall, a premature study on the typically `protestant' genre of epidemics (Verhoeven's `Flesh & Blood' is the first that comes in mind; Dreyer's fixation with Crosses too).Rating: 3/5

* SPOILER WARNING * Director Lars Von Trier, who stars as himself in this mock documentary meta-horror black comedy drama (!), comments early on that "a film should be a pebble in your shoe". With this, he may have accomplished just that. It´s an annoying mess of a movie, which tries to make sense in the last scene, but by then you have been subjected to tons of extraneous footage, bad dubbing, clues and a pretentious movie-within-a-movie, also called Epidemic. Von Trier and cowriter Niels Vørsel tries to finish their script and convince film institute executive Claes Kastholm to finance their movie about a mysterious plague spreading through Europe, but the epidemic seems to have started in real life as well. Or something. The chilling giallo-inspired climactic hypnosis sequence (with real life hypnotist Svend Ali Hamann) is effective, but Von Trier´s ad hoc filmmaking style will test the viewer´s patience. He does, however, make an interesting visit to the hospital, as a sort of premonition to his later hits "The Kingdom 1 + 2". Udo Kier appears briefly as himself. A box office disaster; well two, actually, if you count the vastly ignored re-release in 1997. *½