The last time we were at Manderlay, in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, we saw the second Mrs. de Winter flee a fire that consumed a mansion haunted by the memories of a dead woman. In our last trip in Lars von Trier's America, we saw a young woman, Grace, escape from the smoldering ruins of Dogville, a town infected with fear and deception. Now in von Trier's Manderlay, we return to America, where we find Grace entering a mansion poisoned by the legacy of a dead woman. There will be fire at the end again, though the fire this time will pursue Grace.

A sequel to his brilliant Dogville, Manderlay is the second part of von Trier's planned trilogy on America, possessing the director's singular style that combines often vertiginous camera work with stagecraft and story structuring that's Brecht by way of Thornton Wilder. It's Our Town after a healthy dose of Brecht's alienation effect, complete with ironic commentary from an unseen stage manager.

Manderlay follows Grace's violent departure from Dogville (where she had been enslaved) in the company of her mobster father and his henchmen. They leave the blasted landscape of 1930s Colorado for the backwoods world of Alabama. There, within the iron-paling fence of a plantation called Manderlay, Grace stops the whipping of a black man with the aid of the machine guns carried by her father's associates. What Grace then learns profoundly shocks her: The blacks of Manderlay were never freed after the American Civil War.

Disregarding her father's advice, Grace stays on at Manderlay to teach the former slaves the value of democracy and the joys of industry. In fact, she adopts the very political structure for Manderlay that had forced her into fetters at Dogville. If Dogville was "a life half obliterated by democracy," as Gore Vidal describes the general state of the States, at Manderlay we get closer to Shaw's dictum: "Our liberties destroy all freedom."

Grace invades a functioning human ecology (granted, a twisted and decadent one) to bestow upon it the wisdom of self-determination — like it or not. Needless to state, Grace's aggressive humanitarianism (the presence of machine guns momentarily retires the whip's grim discipline), and her self-trumpeted desire to establish compulsory liberty (except for the beef-witted whites on the plantation who become indentured servants), will appear vaguely familiar to those who follow the news.

The ruse of democracy's hope, coupled with the unexamined racism of the reforming and platitudinous Grace, eventually brings disaster, with our Dogville heroine descending to the level of the environment and grabbing for the whip, which is lovingly referred to as "the Lady's hand." The fire that erupts comes in the forms of torches, as Grace's Frankenstein creations chase after her.

There is great criticism in America about von Trier, who has famously never visited, daring to critique the culture from afar. But as with Dogville, Manderlay ends with an arsenal of brutal images generated by and in America, which serve as a pictorial bibliography for his films. Von Trier is only responding to piles of evidence that Americans themselves are often too blinkered to sort through. Outside of a few documentary filmmakers, his is the lone voice of dissent to be found in wide distribution.

Though she lacks the presence and stature of Nicole Kidman (who played Grace in Dogville), Bryce Dallas Howard succeeds in capturing Grace's mix of blind naiveté and willfulness. The rest of the cast is first-rate, with Willem Dafoe (taking over for James Caan as Grace's mob-boss dad), Danny Glover and Isaach De Bankolé joioning von Trier's new repertory company, Udo Kier, Chloe Sevigny, John Hurt (our sardonic stage manager) and the great Lauren Bacall.