An empty stage, black as the pitch of a damned soul. Chalk lines drawn on the floor to indicate walls, doors, even a gooseberry bush. Names written in block capitals: “Elm Street.” An invisible dog barks, but its outline is drawn, an absence made present. The opening of "Dogville" is not a mere stylistic affectation, a quirk of a Northern European auteur; it is the theatrical device that serves as a declaration of poetics and, at the same time, a scalpel. Lars von Trier, with the precision of a surgeon and the cruelty of an entomologist, strips cinema of its illusionistic skin to perform a moral X-ray in the open air. We are faced with a film that denies itself as a film to become something else: a courtroom, an ethical laboratory, a modern morality play.

The legacy of Bertolt Brecht and his “alienation effect” (the celebrated Verfremdungseffekt) is so blatant it becomes the work’s source code. Von Trier does not want the spectator to be empathetically immersed in the small town of Dogville, lost in the Rocky Mountains. On the contrary, he wants us to remain lucid, detached, a juror summoned to observe the evidence in an experiment on human hypocrisy. The absent set design, the narration divided into a prologue and nine chapters punctuated by a voice-over (the biblical, implacable tones of John Hurt in the original version)—all of it conspires to constantly remind us of the artifice of the medium. And yet, it is precisely from this radical artificiality that a more piercing and universal truth springs forth. By removing the realistic context, von Trier isolates human actions in their barest, most terrible essence. The invisible walls of Dogville hide nothing; every sin, every whisper, every glance laden with lust or contempt is exposed to our view, and to our judgment.

The plot, in its structure, has the simplicity of an apologue. Grace (a Nicole Kidman who offers herself up to martyrdom with a performance of almost unbearable vulnerability), a beautiful woman on the run from mysterious gangsters, finds refuge in the small, seemingly virtuous community of Dogville. Its inhabitants, led by the would-be philosopher and moralist Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), decide to “accept the gift” of her presence, on the condition that she makes herself useful. Thus begins a progressive and inexorable descent into the abyss of human nature. The initial kindness, never disinterested, transforms into expectation, expectation into exploitation, exploitation into systematic abuse, culminating in slavery and the most abject violence. Every inhabitant, from the devout mother to the honest greengrocer, contributes with their own small, daily act of malice. Dogville becomes a synecdoche for the world, a microcosm where the social contract is revealed for what it is: a fragile pact of convenience, ready to shatter the moment power changes hands.

Von Trier, who has famously never set foot in the United States, is not crafting an anti-American pamphlet. That would be a superficial and limiting reading. "Dogville" is, rather, a ferocious critique of the archetype, of the puritanical utopia of the “small town with a big heart,” that foundational myth immortalized by Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra. It is an attack on the image the West has of itself: a community of upright, hardworking individuals whose morality is, in truth, a luxury they can afford only as long as it costs them nothing. The arrival of Grace—the Other, the foreign body—acts as a chemical catalyst, revealing the system’s latent toxicity. She is a gift, yes, but a gift the community does not know how to handle except by consuming it, degrading it, and then rejecting it.

Watching Grace’s progressive humiliation, it is impossible not to think of “Pirate Jenny” (Seeräuber-Jenny), the song from Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. There, too, a humiliated scullery maid dreams of the day a black ship with a skull on its flag will arrive in port to ask her who must be killed. The final catharsis of "Dogville" is the literal and ruthless staging of that very revenge fantasy. When Grace’s father (a James Caan who appears as a demythologized Godfather, a gangster-philosopher) arrives to retrieve her, the debate between them is no longer about the townspeople’s guilt, but about the nature of forgiveness. Grace, in her infinite capacity for understanding, has made herself guilty of arrogance: the arrogance of forgiving acts she had no right to forgive, because they were committed not against her, but against the very principles of humanity. Her conclusion is terrible and logically unassailable: to make the world a better place, perhaps Dogville should not exist at all.

The violence of the epilogue, choreographed with glacial slowness to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Young Americans” during the end credits (a sonic counterpoint of absolute genius), serves the same cathartic and disturbing function as the finale of Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. It is not entertainment; it is not spectacle. It is the closing of a theorem. The handheld camera, a trademark of the Dogme 95 movement from which von Trier was by then taking his leave, stalks the characters in this non-place, creating a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia in a technically infinite space. The acting, deprived of the support of props and environments, becomes hyper-realistic, a concentrate of gestures and glances entrusted with the full weight of the drama. The stellar cast (Lauren Bacall, Stellan Skarsgård, Ben Gazzara, Chloë Sevigny) accepts the challenge, offering raw, almost documentary-like performances that make the parable even more believable and, therefore, more shattering.

"Dogville" is a work that repels the viewer, challenges them, accuses them. It asks us whether we too, put in the same conditions, would not have started to shift the chalk line of our own morality, one centimeter at a time. It is an essay on human ethology disguised as a film, a treatise on philosophical misanthropy with roots as much in Hobbes as in a certain American literature of sin, from Hawthorne to Shirley Jackson. The most chilling detail, perhaps, is the only survivor of the final purge: the dog, Moses, the only one granted the grace that was so brutally denied to the human protagonist. Perhaps because, in von Trier’s world, honest bestiality is preferable to hypocritical humanity. A cruel, necessary masterpiece, impossible to love but, once seen, impossible to forget. A black mirror pointed directly at the face of our civilization.