Nymphomaniac
By the time Nymphomaniac came around, von Trier had already made Antichrist and Melancholia and Dogville, so you basically knew what he was going to do with a film structured around a woman’s sexual compulsion. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a woman found beaten in an alley, and the entire film is her confession to a stranger - chapters of her life, her desire, the compulsive machinery of how it actually works.
He doesn’t soften any of it. The film is explicit and unapologetic because it has to be - the subject doesn’t work if you flinch away. Von Trier’s interested in the gap between desire and shame, between what the body wants and what the mind can’t accept. Not transgression for the sake of it, but the real shape of that conflict.
So yeah, it’s a sex film, but not one that’s trying to get you off. It’s trying to show you something true and uncomfortable, and it’ll be as graphic as it needs to be to do that. Which apparently is very.
I never actually saw it, so I can’t tell you if it worked. But that’s always the bet with him.