Europa

Europa (1991) is a hypnotic black-and-white thriller from Lars von Trier — a Danish-German-French-Swedish co-production you can watch online on iFILM. It's 1945, the rubble still smoking. Leopold Kessler, a young German-American played by Jean-Marc Barr, arrives in occupied Germany hoping to do some good. He takes a job as a sleeping-car conductor on the railways. He is immediately in over his head.

American military officers, underground Nazi holdouts called Werewolves, and the railroad owner's dangerously complicated family all have plans for Leopold, and none of them coincide. Von Trier shoots the film in layers: actors move through studio-projected backgrounds, color bleeds into the monochrome at unexpected moments, and Max von Sydow narrates the whole thing in a low hypnotic voice-over that frames Leopold's experience as a countdown to something irreversible. The jury prize and technical prize at Cannes 1991 both went to this film — the jury prize shared, the technical award not.

Calling it a historical thriller undersells how strange it is. It moves like a bad dream that you understand only after waking up. Stream Europa (1991) online on iFILM.