Von Trier's first film ranks with anything he's ever done visually, but otherwise it feels very much like a first movie, even a student film by a student of obvious genius. While Von Trier's visual influences are more obvious here than usual- namely, Tarkovsky, he borrows the style and perhaps transcends it. The use of water here is perhaps more dazzling than anything Tarkovsky achieved. Their are surfaces that seem impossible and dream-like, above and below the abyss at once. It is very dream-like, and that is a problem. The plot is a rather over-baked Kafka-ized noir cliché. As in "Europa," its all about how all is already written, but not in the religious, apocalyptic sense of his later work. Here, the apocalypse has already happened. All presence is absence. Which, I think, makes Von Trier a filmmaker alert to his cultural moment. Everything was inevitablest, post-modern irony until shortly before 911, and then the possibility of radical rupture re-introduced itself into the world, and into Von Trier's art. Change, be it glorious or disastrous, messianic or satanic, was and is again on the menu.