Make no mistake, chronic depressive patients have been known to drag their carer and friends and family down with them. They want to pass on what they don't want to have. The more advanced cases want to pass on what they have embodied: Hatred itself.

The last time he lured us into his hateful, hopeless world of Melancholia with a beautiful earth under threat and female nudity.

This time he is luring us into his apathetic, impotent, joyless world with more meaningless sex and equally indifferent naked human bodies.

Smell his amorphous, soul-less, joy-sapping mental virus offering from ten thousand km away. Run, smart and joyful ones, run.

Ruined the movie if you take that for consideration. I honestly think that the last two minutes were added when the movie was too long, they cut a large chunk of it, and decided to end it what that garbage. I was contemplating whether or not to support the filmmaker and see it in the theater, but now my opinion has changed.

Joe had the whore of Babylon and Messalina by her side when she was younger, perhaps guiding her. All her life, she seems to have found herself in more and more destructive scenarios – with, perhaps, some respite here and there. Some love felt, if not acknowledged, and here – while I agree a different ending would be more profound – her shooting a man who called himself "asexual" for trying to mount her is not insane or a fumble. It is entirely plausible Skarsgard's character was deviating from his own attraction to Joe during their conversations – maybe he was a virgin, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to explore in the recesses of his mind – but it doesn't his final action doesn't render his points pointless.

Furthermore, Joe has decided to stand up for herself and not allow herself to slide into the deprivation she now sees in nymphomania. She has changed and that ending makes such knowledge resolute.

I loved the film prior to the conclusion. I felt it was so tactful and thoughtful, but I do agree the ending is, in a way, a digression out of a love for cinema and literature. "If you introduce a gun into a plot, you must use it" It surely never needed to be and that the film was able to do that (yet still chose to) is an impressive feat. I think Bergman would be proud.

For myself, Von Trier's oeuvre is getting very hard to accept– And this comes from a woman who loves to examine the dark side of humanity via film . I gravitate to Von Trier. Even almost accepted the female self mutilation in Anti- Christ.

Lars Von Trier himself and the incredibly gifted Charlotte Gainsbourg have said they don't understand at times why he 'does what he does'. Well, if THEY don't understand it, who does they think his audience is, everyone of us students of Sigmund Freud?
He intentionally let's us into his nymphomaniac's (or himself as he has bizarrely stated) past, more compassionately than any other feminine character in his bevy of tormented souls . The movie is good, it has a lyrical flow. A Catharsis for them BOTH.
But the ending simply doesn't ring true with the story before it . It would have made more sense had Seligman the 'innocent' listener/ observer showed sexual interest and Joe was knowingly titillating him for the hell of it- via her story.
And at the end? She went HIS room, shot him and simply walked out. That, I could've accepted as her saying, "another man- sex – no hope, he deserved it 'for all the others."
But , after seeing a self professed kindly asexual –come in her room and RAPE after her all the sincerity ? It made no sense and was a cheap shot by the director just to make sure we knew this IS Von Trier after all- that messed up director with a lot of talent but no shred of a human filter.
With his tale of Joe, the self professed Nymphomaniac, his oeuvre has put all females in the same league as (likely Von Trier's favorite anti- heroine) EVE. For as her , all of us women take the apple from the snake and are punished for it.
Why do I know that ? Cause the Bible and Von Trier tell me so.

1) this never struck me as the LVT's intent and I have yet to hear an explanation for why people suspect this. Everyone just assumes this is an utterly obvious interpretation, yet the film focuses much more on what are termed "outcasts sexualities"—pedophile, asexual, quasi-incestuous, S&M—and one woman's difficult experience living among them.

and 2) because there's no such thing as "female sexuality" writ large and any such sweeping claim about women's experience is doomed to fail and offend (too lazy to prove this point again here but see Judith Butler, bell hooks, etc). Why anybody would expect or even demand this subject to be treated is beyond me; sexuality can only be approached through its particulars and Nymphomaniac is about a very particular experience of one very particular women, who spends half her time emphatically rejecting such universalizing interpretations. In fact, to characterize Nymphomaniac as "about female sexuality" is to immediately condemn it to failure.

Please find more interesting and less brutally misguided ways to think about this movie.

The ending also did not ring true to me, although I suspect many men would actually try and initiate sex with a sleeping woman they had grown so close too. It was also, very much out of character for Seli to just up and rape her after that final speech.