Dogville

Dogville (2003) is a Lars von Trier crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a young woman running from gangsters who stumbles into a Depression-era mountain hamlet and asks the locals for shelter. The film is staged on a bare studio floor — house walls sketched in chalk, streets marked with white lines — while John Hurt narrates in chapters like a dark fable.

The townspeople agree to hide Grace, provided she earns her keep. Tom Edison, a would-be writer played by Paul Bettany, brokers the deal and watches as the arrangement shifts. What begins as chores quietly becomes something uglier. Stellan Skarsgård, Patricia Clarkson, and Lauren Bacall round out a cast whose characters peel back their genteel facades layer by layer, pushed along by the growing threat that someone will turn Grace in.

Premiered at Cannes in May 2003, Dogville divided critics and won several European Film Awards. Von Trier uses the artifice of the bare stage to strip away every excuse for what ordinary people are capable of when fear and self-interest take over. At 178 minutes, the film builds to a finale that rewards the patience it demands. Watch Dogville (2003) on iFILM.