There's a plot here, but being a Lars von Trier film – even a very early one – that's not by a long shot all there is.

Bess (Emily Watson) is a naive, very sheltered, God fearing young Scot in a seaside village who's fallen in love with outsider Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), something quite frowned upon in her village as the opening scene reveals. But as deferential to her village elders and God as she is, Bess is determined to be Jan's wife.

At first we think it's all going wrong from the get go when the helicopter he and his party of boisterous, drunken groomsmen arrive in is late and she starts to lay into him, but it's plain she's smitten – asking him to take her to an upstairs bathroom and deflower her during the reception party, staring at the ceiling in what looks like rapturous wonder.

She finds their relationship idyllic, but there's a shadow looming as Jan, who works on an offshore oil rig with his buddies, only has so much time off before he has to go back.

Bess is crushed and bereft at his absence, her life coming to a virtual standstill without him, his imminent return her only solace. And though it's never referenced directly, it might also be a story about what a noxious mix religious dogmatism, keeping people hidden from the world and mental illness is.

Bess, who works as a cleaner in the small village church, sometimes sits on the floor and prays out loud, taking on the voice of God Himself to answer, berating her for being selfish and stupid.

And when God (apparently) asks her if she's sure she wants Jan to come home early because she can't stand to be away from him, it's a Faustian bargain when he's critically injured on the rig and flown home paralysed, destined never to work again and enslaving Bess to look after him.

Bess isn't altogether upset about it - she loves Jan so much she's happy to attend to his every need. But Jan is in a bad way. Because of his injuries, the meds and the treatment he drifts in and out of consciousness and lucidity, and it's when he's fully awake one day, lamenting that he'll never make love to his wife again, that he asks her the unthinkable. He wants her to sleep with other men and come back to tell him everything about it.

Bess is less horrified than she is unsure how to go about it, not wanting anyone but him but convinced if she does so it will restore him to health. So she begins a tragic odyssey of stop/start, very awkward and unfulfilling encounters with men who range between uncaring and dangerous, a project that's asking for trouble in such a cloistered and religiously conservative community.

von Trier and co-writer Peter Asmussen's script might have been thematically concerned with the toxic effect religious conservatism can have on mental health issues, or they might have been making a plain old tragic love story, a modern day Romero & Juliet.

It's not the Dogme aesthetic von Trier would later embrace fully with Dogville and Manderlay, but even though the film is full of rich emotion it has a curiously detached, documentary style I was never sure was completely on purpose.

It also marked the arrival of a major talent in Watson, who has such a quality that's both blissfully unknowing – almost childlike – while being sexually alive and who makes you want to consume her for her beauty and protect her for her innocence and the danger she's constantly in, sometimes in the same scene.