An ordeal. If one had to distill the experience of Breaking the Waves into a single term, “ordeal” would be the most fitting. An archaic, divine trial in which innocence or guilt is determined by an extreme physical test. And here the test is not only for the protagonist, the tormented and luminous Bess McNeill, but for the viewer himself, forced by Lars von Trier into a cinematic rite of passage that leaves behind debris, doubts, and an unpleasant, powerful form of grace. The film, the first chapter of the so-called “Golden Heart Trilogy,” is an emotional seismograph that records the tremors of a soul at its limit, filmed with the brutality of a war documentary and structured with the solemnity of a sacred text.

We are on a remote Scottish island, battered by the wind and the strictest Calvinist morality. A place where God is a severe and patriarchal entity, whose precepts are administered by a council of bearded elders who look like they have stepped out of a Rembrandt painting. In this theocratic microcosm, Bess (a debutante Emily Watson in one of the most devastating performances in cinema history) is a “simple” creature, a Dostoevskian “holy fool” whose purity is so radical that it is mistaken for mental instability. Her direct conversations with God, in which she plays both accuser and comforter, are the beating and disturbing heart of the film. Von Trier, with diabolical mastery, never clarifies whether this is authentic mystical communion or schizophrenic dialogue. Is Bess a saint or a madwoman? Perhaps, as Flannery O'Connor suggested in her gothic stories of the American South, the two are not mutually exclusive, and grace manifests itself precisely through the grotesque and the violent.

The arrival of Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), an oil rig worker, a pagan and vital outsider, is a crack in the system. Their love is total, physical, a carnal epiphany that scandalizes the community. But when an accident leaves Jan paralyzed, the love pact turns into a sacrificial pact. Jan, fearing that Bess will die without him, urges her to find other lovers and tell him the details, believing that this will keep her alive and, by extension, him too. Thus begins Bess's descent into a hell of self-denial and humiliation, a via crucis that she interprets as a divine mandate for her husband's salvation. Love becomes martyrdom, faith a mechanism of self-destruction.

The fundamental split in the film is inscribed in its very stylistic DNA. On the one hand, the main narrative is shot with a nervous and feverish handheld camera, a cinéma vérité that sticks to faces, violates the characters' personal space, and makes us uncomfortable, voyeuristic witnesses. Robby Müller's grainy photography, intermittently saturated and desaturated, rejects any embellishment, recording the rawness of the landscape and emotions. It is an aesthetic of contingency, of immanence, which slightly anticipates the dictates of the Dogma 95 manifesto that von Trier himself would co-sign the following year. We are trapped in Bess's subjective experience, without filters, without the reassuring distance of classical composition.

This brutal immersion is contrasted, with an almost Brechtian effect of estrangement, by the signs that divide the film into chapters. Each chapter is introduced by a static, almost pictorial image, a tableau vivant that looks like a cross between a romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich and the cover of a 1970s prog rock album. These images, artificially colored and accompanied by iconic songs by David Bowie, Procol Harum, or Elton John, create a hiatus, a reflective pause that elevates the sordid chronicle of Bess's martyrdom to a mythical, almost fairy-tale dimension. It is a striking antinomy: the raw realism of the narrative and the blatant artificiality of its structure. Von Trier tells us that we are watching a parable, a legend, even as he forces us not to look away from the tortured flesh of his heroine.

The most obvious debt, almost a spiritual filiation, is to Carl Theodor Dreyer. Emily Watson's face, like that of Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, becomes a map of suffering and ecstasy, a landscape in which a theological battle is fought. Von Trier uses close-ups not to psychologize, but to spiritualize, to seek a glimmer of transcendence in the most abject pain. But if Dreyer's Joan was a lucid victim of power, von Trier's Bess is a more ambiguous figure, whose “goodness” is so extreme that it becomes a destructive force, an aberration that the system cannot contain and must expel.

Watson's performance is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Without makeup, without vanity, she offers herself to the camera with a vulnerability that is almost painful to watch. Her body, her face, her voice, which slips from childlike naivety to desperate harshness, are the tools through which the film reaches its most unbearable and sublime heights. It is a total immersion that goes beyond acting, an act of faith that mirrors that of her character.

And then there is the ending. An ending that has divided and continues to divide, a twist that can be read as a genuine miracle, a cynical and cruel joke, or, more subtly, as a meta-cinematic commentary on the power of storytelling. After nearly three hours of ruthless realism, in which every hope is systematically trampled upon, von Trier performs an act of pure magic, an apotheosis as brazen as it is moving. The bells ringing from the sky are an intrusion of the supernatural, a divine reward that validates Bess's sacrifice in retrospect. It is the response of a demiurge to the blind faith of his creature. For some, it is a betrayal of the tone of the film, an easy consolation. For others, it is the ultimate affirmation that faith, however absurd and self-destructive, can literally move mountains and ring invisible bells. It is cinema becoming God, granting grace through a special effect, recognizing that fairy tales are sometimes truer than reality.

Breaking the Waves is not a film that is “appreciated” in the conventional sense of the term. It is an experience to be endured, an interrogation of the essence of faith, love, and sacrifice. It puts the viewer in the uncomfortable position of the council of elders: do we judge Bess? Do we condemn her for her madness? Or do we allow ourselves to be shaken by the terrifying possibility that her logic of love, however misguided, may contain a spark of divine truth? It is a heart-wrenching, imperfect, manipulative work and, for this very reason, an absolute masterpiece, a scar that cinema has inflicted on us to remind us of what it is capable of when it stops comforting us and decides to put us to the test.