Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac closes the Depression Trilogy he began with Antichrist (2009) and continued with Melancholia (2011), the three films he made after a severe depressive episode and a public commitment to confront his own preoccupations on screen. Nymphomaniac arrived in 2013 as a single long work that was split into two theatrical volumes for distribution; a five-and-a-half-hour director's cut followed. Volume I won the Bodil Award for Best Danish Film at the 2014 ceremony.

The film is structured as a confession across one long night. Stellan Skarsgård's Seligman, a scholarly bachelor who lives alone among his books, finds Charlotte Gainsbourg's Joe collapsed in an alley and brings her home. As she recovers on his guest bed, she insists on telling him her life story, framed around her own diagnosis of herself as a nymphomaniac. Volume I traces Joe's chapters from childhood onward, with Stacy Martin in her debut feature playing the younger Joe and Shia LaBeouf playing the mechanic Jerôme. The cast also includes Christian Slater, Connie Nielsen, and Uma Thurman in a celebrated single-scene appearance.

Critically, Volume I received warmer notices than its second part, with reviewers responding to von Trier's interleaving of Joe's narrative with Seligman's scholarly digressions on fly fishing, Bach polyphony, the Fibonacci sequence and Greek Orthodox iconography. The film's most striking technical signature is the cinematography of Manuel Alberto Claro and the unbroken use of contemporary digital cinema for material that aspires to literary scale.