Phil and Emily are joined by Emmy-winning Hacks creator Lucia Aniello for Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003). Nicole Kidman's fugitive Grace hides out in a Depression-era Rocky Mountain town staged entirely with chalk outlines on a bare soundstage, and the townsfolk's charity slowly curdles into something monstrous. Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, Patricia Clarkson, and James Caan fill out von Trier's three-hour moral experiment, narrated with dry glee by John Hurt.

The three dig into the chalk-outline staging as both radical theater and pure provocation, Kidman spending her post-Hours Oscar heat on the least commercial project imaginable, and where the film's brutal final turn lands two decades on. There's a real case here for reading Dogville as the most savage thing ever built to look like a filmed stage play. Cruel, funny, and unlike anything else same as the movie.

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Emily St. James - https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

Lucia Aniello - https://www.instagram.com/luciaaniellosetfits

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