God is real… And a sadistic punishing force in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). The film is the first in his infamous “Golden Heart Trilogy,” which consists of tales of kindhearted women with doomed fates that result from a cruel cocktail of circumstance and societal injustice. The other films in the trilogy include The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Set in the Scottish Highlands during the 1970s, Breaking the Waves traces the endurance of faith in the childlike Bess, whose adherence to God and her Free Scottish Presbyterian Calvinist Church is challenged by her marriage to Danish oil rigger and non-churchgoer Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). With a lengthy runtime, Breaking the Waves is thinly plotted and uses extended sequences (sometimes, painfully so) of intimate acts—prayer, tantrums, and sex—to move audiences through Bess’s crisis of faith.
Played by an emotionally exposed Emily Watson in her film debut, Bess is saturated with feelings that overwhelm her and frequently see her break the fourth wall to invite audiences in to share in that affective weight. Her love for music and the bells that do not exist at her church transform the film with a bit of magical realism, as well as eye-popping chapter titles (executed in the best mid-1990s computer graphics) that are accompanied with classic pop-rock tunes. Though much of the film aesthetically follows the grueling doctrine of the Dogme 95 manifesto, von Trier’s commitment to Bess, however complicated, forces the film to break its aesthetic attendance to naturalism and embrace what he described as “emotional cinematography.” After an accident at the rig leaves Jan paralyzed, Bess is tasked with the impossible fork in the road for women enduring the severity of hardcore Protestant Christianity: obey and serve your husband or God?
Devotion to God, and by extension the church, is physically understood through the debasement of the flesh that is pruriently demanded of women and not men. Bess, along with the other women in the congregation (the majority of the townsfolk are church parishioners), are frequently used as domestic labor for the church and yet are not permitted to speak during service, nor attend the funeral rites for deceased members. Indeed, the blight of Bess resides in the calcification of an environment that is firmly stuck on the Madonna/Whore complex, where all non-mothers are perceived as dripping with deviance for their ability to tempt men. The latter is most cruelly depicted when Bess is seen with a man that is not her husband and demonized for it by children with rocks, and further shunned by adults. It is unsurprising that in such a restrictive environment, Bess becomes her own god in her frequent prayers, answering her (own) queries with closed eyes, a deeper voice, and sadistic responses.
In her writing on sexuality beyond consent, the scholar Avgi Saketopoulou describes exigent sadism as a demanding will that is antireparative and risky. Risk here is understood for its desire to leap, to act on faith with the recognition that you will be harmed. Viewing Breaking the Waves as a recovering Christian presents the purest visualization of the impossibility and difficulty of acting on faith. This is synthesized in a key scene where Bess courageously tells the church that “You cannot love a word. You can love a person.” In this sense, Bess is the embodiment of James 2:16: “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” It takes the will of a sadist to act on faith.
Breaking the Waves screens tonight, June 5, and on June 8, at the Paris Theater as part of the series “Bleak Week 2026.”
