Lars von Trier’s Women, edited by Rex Butler and David Denny. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 (264 pages).

When Linda Badley published her Lars von Trier in 2011, she inaugurated a series of informed, rigorous monographs on the Danish director. Scholarly interest in the work of von Trier has steadily increased since then, as demonstrated by the recent publication of, among others, Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, edited by Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, and Ahmed Elbeshlawy’s Woman in Lars von Trier’s Cinema, 1996–2014. Elbeshlawy is also a contributor to the similarly titled Lars von Trier’s Women, edited by Rex Butler and David Denny. What differentiates the two volumes is the scope: Woman in Lars von Trier’s Cinema focuses on von Trier’s films from 1996 to 2014, whereas the book edited by Butler and Denny also includes the director’s early works. From Menthe—The Blissful (Menthe—la bienheureuse, 1979) to his most recent film Nymphomaniac Volume II (2013), female protagonists are brought to the forefront of a comprehensive analysis in this edited collection. Particular focus is placed on the Depression Trilogy (Antichrist [2009], Melancholia [2011], and Nymphomaniac I and II [2013]) that, the editors contend, had yet to receive its deserved level of scholarly attention.