General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Element of Crime

The Element of Crime (Danish: Forbrydelsens element) is a 1984 Danish crime film directed by Lars von Trier, his debut feature, in which an exiled detective undergoes hypnosis in Cairo to relive his final murder investigation in a decaying, dreamlike Europe.¹ It is the first film of von Trier's Europa trilogy, followed by Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991).²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Forbrydelsens element (Denmark, 1984)³
Director / screenwriters	Lars von Trier; screenplay by von Trier and Niels Vørsel¹
Key crew	Cinematography Tom Elling; music Bo Holten; film and sound editor Tómas Gislason¹
Principal cast	Michael Elphick (Fisher), Esmond Knight (Osborne), Me Me Lai (Kim), Jerold Wells (Kramer)¹
Cannes 1984	Screened in competition as a first film; won the Grand Prix de la Commission Supérieure Technique⁴
Europa trilogy	First of three films with Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991)²
Visual signature	Sulfurous yellow, sodium-toned monochrome pierced by flashes of electric blue and red¹
Criterion edition	Spine #80; director-approved 3K restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack¹

Spoilers

Plot

Fisher, a former police investigator played by Michael Elphick, has lived in Cairo for thirteen years.¹^•⁵ Suffering memory loss and violent headaches after his last case, he consults a therapist who uses hypnosis to guide him back through his memories of Europe.⁴^•⁶ The case concerned a serial killer targeting young girls, and Fisher had gone to dangerous lengths to enter the mind of the killer in order to catch him.¹

Under hypnosis Fisher returns to a nocturnal Europe and follows the trail of the chief suspect, Harry Grey, accompanied by Kim, a prostitute who befriends him.⁵ Unable to find the culprit, he had turned to Osborne, an aged writer once respected for his contributions to criminology, and adopted Osborne's technique of empathizing with serial killers.³ The film's title comes from Osborne's book on the psychology of murder; the film historian Peter Cowie, who has provided commentaries for the Criterion Collection, describes Harry Grey as a red herring, a McGuffin in the Hitchcock tradition who leads Fisher back to his mentor Osborne.⁷ As the detective becomes increasingly absorbed in the method, the boundary between hunter and hunted erodes and events take a disturbing turn.³

Style and technique

The film's most distinctive quality is its color. Von Trier and cinematographer Tom Elling saturated the negative with yellow, giving each scene a lurid saffron hue punctuated by startling blues from lamps or television screens; the Criterion synopsis describes a sulfurous yellow glow pierced by flashes of electric blue and red.⁷^•¹

Elling's photography builds on deep, receding perspectives of corridors, tunnels, bridges, and waterlogged halls, with light sources placed inside the frame so the amber glow appears to emanate from the world itself. Compositions are frequently canted or organized around a single luminous point in smothering dark, and the debt to The Third Man and Wellesian expressionism is unmistakable. The camera moves with unhurried, floating deliberation, and several sequences are staged in single extended takes.⁸ Cowie compares the result to the masters of German silent cinema such as Murnau, Lang, and Pabst, and finds the film reminiscent of the early work of Andrei Tarkovsky.⁷

The four classical elements run through the imagery: water, earth, fire, and air each fill the screen at some point, and the characters trudge through mud and rain as though moving underwater in a trance.⁷ The setting is a post-apocalyptic Europe, filmed largely in Germany, that seems devastated by more than war; scholars note that the fictional town of "Halbestadt" appears on no ordinary map, though a real Halberstadt exists in the former East Germany.⁹

The Europa trilogy

The Element of Crime is the first panel of a triptych conceived with Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991), films linked by hypnotic states and by von Trier's conception of a postwar Europe still in unconscious thrall to the demons of fascism.² The trilogy's through-line, that Europe is a patient under trance narrating its own history without being able to wake, is made explicit in Europa's second-person countdown narration.⁸ The theme of disease and pollution introduced here recurs through von Trier's later work, from the hospital setting of The Kingdom to the physical trauma of Breaking the Waves.⁷

Production and reception

Von Trier graduated from the Danish Film School (Den Danske Filmskole) in 1983, where his student films Nocturne (1980) and Befrielsesbilleder / Images of a Relief (1982) had already attracted attention and awards; the debut extends those films' interest in stylized, slowed, chromatically manipulated images.⁸ It was the first film von Trier wrote together with Niels Vørsel, then a relatively little-known Danish author of three novels and some radio plays.¹⁰ Despite its elaborate look, the film was the second-cheapest Danish production of 1984.¹⁰

At the 1984 Festival de Cannes the film was screened in competition as a first film and won the Grand Prix de la Commission Supérieure Technique, the festival's technical grand prize.⁴ Later aggregate scores have been moderately favorable: Metacritic lists a Metascore of 66, with four positive and two mixed reviews and no negative ones, and Rotten Tomatoes lists an 83% Tomatometer from 18 reviews.¹¹^•¹² Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a film noir "murky without being terribly mysterious" while noting its debts to Touch of Evil and The Third Man; Time Out compared its startling assurance to Eraserhead.¹¹

Home video and availability

The Criterion Collection issued the film as Spine #80 in a director-approved edition with a 3K digital restoration, uncompressed monaural soundtrack, two audio commentaries, a 1984 making-of documentary, and von Trier's student films Nocturne and Images of Liberation; it is also available in the Lars von Trier's Europe Trilogy Blu-ray box set.¹ A 4K restoration circulated theatrically in France in July 2023 as part of a complete von Trier retrospective presented by Les Films du Losange.⁶ In the United States the film streams on MUBI and the MUBI Amazon Channel.³

Reported running times differ slightly by source: Criterion lists 103 minutes,¹ while the BFI and JustWatch list 104 minutes.¹³^•³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026