In 1995, Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg penned their Dogme 95 Manifesto: a collection of guidelines stripping cinema to the bone. Three years later, Thomas Vinterberg released Dogme #1, The Celebration (1998).

The supreme goal of the Dogme 95 Manifesto was to force truth out of a film’s characters and settings. To do so, partaking filmmakers would abide by extreme rules. These rules include only shooting on location, strictly using a handheld camera, and forbidding any temporal or geographical alienation. Upon taking the manifesto’s “Vow of Chastity,” filmmakers swear that they will seek the truth of the moment by all means available and at the cost of any taste or aesthetic consideration.

The Celebration is the first crack either director made at creating a feature which follows the rules and regulations of Dogme 95. Preceding other notable Dogme iterations such as Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots (1999) and Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), The Celebration is not only one of Vinterberg’s crowning achievements, but it is also perhaps the magnum opus of the entire Dogme movement.

The harrowing film features Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) preparing to celebrate his father’s sixtieth birthday alongside a seemingly endless bunch of family and friends. What appears at first to be a well-deserved family reunion quickly devolves into a nightmarish chamber drama after Christian reveals a disturbing secret. For the remainder of the evening, each of the party’s attendees must decide what—and who—to believe. The Celebration delivers a haunting tale about how bourgeois decorum is a farce, how trauma boils over, and how generational trust can come crashing down over the course of one night.