The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Despite its frequent lack of focus as it tries to make a coherent point, von Trier's debut also indicates the way his later films would go in seeking for unorthodox ways to unsettle the viewer's sensibilities. Michael Elphick plays a policeman investigating a serial killer by means of following in his exact footsteps, until the act of mirroring the murderer so closely starts to take over his own personality. The lighting is a miasma of sickly sodium-yellow murk throughout, the world a crumbling, dystopian Europe of an indeterminate future and the air overall that of a Kafkaesque nightmare where the protagonist is quite lost and all the other characters cyphers whose interjections make little sense, indeed reminiscent of Haneke's 1997 adaptation of Kafka's The Castle. It takes many stumbling steps and is frequently wilfully discomfiting, as is von Trier's wont, but for all its flaws it's also immersive and quite singular.

6/10