Love is a mighty power. But what can a love with great power lead to? With this question in mind I start digging deeper into Lars Von Triers courageous approach to the Christian dogma of unconditional love and sacrifice, in his two-and-a-half-hours dramaBreaking the Waves.The film revolves around the character of Bess, a woman with traditional values who dedicates her entire existence to loving her husband unconditionally. Her love evolves under the holy consent of God, whom Bess looks at as the inmate who she always confesses to. Everyday Bess waits impatiently for her husband to return from his heavy-duty job at the shipyard. She yearns for him to always be with her with a naive, infantile eagerness for happiness, which she can only obtain while having him close.Her wish is fulfilled, with a terrible price: her husband suffers a work accident that leaves him disables, having to spend his entire life in bed. Bess is invaded by guilt, blaming herself for her husbands miserable destiny. She looks at this incident as a punishment for her mistake of disregarding the love of God in favor of her love for her husband.Jan, who feels emasculated by Besss devotion after the accident, tries to relief the guilt of not being able to satisfy her sexually by urging her to sleep with other men. He encourages her to return to him to retrace the experience together. Without questioning it Bess does so, considering this the offering that she needs to give God in order to see her husband back on his feet. Her sexual encounters with strangers become more and more dangerous as she believes that the more she hurts herself, the sooner her due will be paid. This culminates with her death, after being raped and killed on a boat, by a group of barbarian sailors.Von Trier recreates the Christian sacrifice in a context that makes it easier to grasp and understand, in an attempt to either enforce or destroy the principles of agape love. The viewer is the judge.Through Bess, the character who loves God unconditionally, Von Trier shows us how absolute love leads to absolute disaster. But, the mischievous touch of genius is revealed in the supernatural and unexpected closure of his parable: through a miracle, Jan starts walking again, while the sky commemorates with holy chants, the now-saint Bess for her act of bravery.We can look at Bess as a heroine willing to pay the price for Eves mistake, or as a woman with a pathological obsession, with no discernment between good and bad whatsoever. We can look at Jan as an Adam willing to get his revenge or as a good man who thinks he knows what is best for his woman. We can hate Von Trier for making us doubt, but we can never say his intention was to destroy our faith. With the ending of his film he encourages us to turn to unconditional love, while through the entire story he just warns us that its not an easy road to take.