74%User score 74 percent
Blue Collar
1978 · Drama · Crime
User Score
2K votes
In a world of shadows, she found the light of life.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
Recommendations based on this film
FrontrunnerParis
December 31, 2020
Dazzling Björk in this indictment against the death sentence, in tight close-ups. This film is a UFO, musical without being.
Read the full review on TMDBbadelf
October 31, 2025
I have tremendous respect for Lars von Trier's work, and I deeply admire his courage in attempting to fuse drama with musical theater. "Dancer in the Dark" is nothing if not audacious. Unfortunately, ambition alone doesn't make a successful film, and this one fails both as a drama and as a musical. As drama, the film stumbles on two fundamental levels. First, the handheld, shaky camera movement is completely unnecess…
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CinemaSerf
December 4, 2025
You get a clue as to the slightly surreal nature of the drama right from a start that sees Björk and Catherine Deneuve doing their own amateur dramatics rehearsals of “The Sound of Music”! It turns out that the former, “Selma”, is a Czech immigrant to the USA who is suffering from a progressive blindness that she has passed on to her young son. She knows that he still has time to have corrective surgery, but she has…
Read the full review on TMDBReviews are written by the TMDB community, not by Dancer in the Dark's publisher.
