The Idiots (1998)

Lars von Trier's second entry in the Dogme 95 canon arrives with the confidence of a man who read the manifesto and treated it as a dare. A troupe of able-bodied Danes spend their afternoons performing mental incompetence in restaurants, a practice they call spassing, in order to unsettle the bourgeoisie. The camera shakes, the digital grain glows, and everyone involved seems certain they are committing an act of courage.

Regard the politics closely and the cupboard is bare. The cast is uniformly white and Nordic. The romantic entanglements are strictly heterosexual. Disability is not represented but worn as a costume, a decision that drew condemnation at Cannes and prompted an Ofcom inquiry when Channel 4 broadcast it years later. Nothing here resembles inclusive casting, and nothing suggests any curiosity about the inner life of the disabled. The disabled are a prop, and the joke lands on the audience for flinching.

The group's rebellion aims at conformity, at the stifling respectability of the Danish middle class, not at capital or its machinery. The targets are smugness and boredom. Karen and Susanne are granted real interiority, and the closing scene, in which Karen dribbles her food at her husband's table and receives a slap for it, carries genuine weight. But von Trier is too busy being provocative to moralize, and the film argues its case through shock and Dogme austerity, not sermon. Twenty-five years on, it reads as a period piece: abrasive, self-satisfied, and largely free of the social consciousness it imagines it possesses.