Dancer in the Dark (2000)

IMDb plot summary: An East European girl travels to the United States with her young son, expecting it to be like a Hollywood film.
Directed by Lars von Trier. Starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, and Peter Stormare.

(Spoilers ahead.)

This is definitely an unusual musical but hauntingly so. I think without the musical numbers it would have just felt needlessly melodramatic to me (a frequent criticism of this movie, it seems) but with them it brought it to a different level. The songs definitely have Bjork's sort of eerie dreamy style, which makes the whole thing so unsettling, especially as the number of songs ramps up the further we get into the film, so the worse life gets for Selma, the more interludes we have where she interprets them through cheery musical numbers. There's something very striking about Bjork's performance as well -- she seems to float through and above this movie even when she's not singing, with this dissociative quality that, for me, really drives home the horrors of everything happening to her.

I also love how, until the very very end, the movie never reveals how the outside world is reacting to the musical numbers happening inside her head. We see her singing joyously as she's leaving the crime scene or being arrested by police, so we get a sense of where the narrative's taken us, but it allows us to fill in the gaps and doesn't worry about providing every little plot detail, which I love.

Overall a movie that will definitely sit with me for a long time and I'm glad I finally got the push to see it.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Dancer in the Dark > The Italian Job (2003)
Dancer in the Dark > Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Dancer in the Dark < The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Dancer in the Dark > Big Trouble in Little China
Dancer in the Dark < Planet of the Apes (1968)
Dancer in the Dark > Face/Off
Dancer in the Dark > Summer Wars
Dancer in the Dark < Jesus People: The Movie
Dancer in the Dark > Scream
Dancer in the Dark > Fright Night (2011)
Dancer in the Dark < Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead
Final spot: #509 out of 3163.