Eight bourgeois tourists are stranded in the middle of a North African desert and no one walks away with a million dollars in The King Is Alive, the fourth film to be officially certified by the Dogma 95 collective and definitive proof of its meaningless tenets and bankrupt ideology. The last entry by one of the group's original founders (following Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, Lars Von Trier's The Idiots, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune), Kristian Levring's high-concept psychodrama defies its ostensible aim to stripped-down realism. Limited to handheld digital video cameras, available light, and production sound, among other mandated restrictions, Levring makes effective use of the photogenic locale to compensate for DV's degraded picture quality. The King Is Alive may be the most visually engaging Dogma film to date, but color-saturated images can't obscure its contrived, implausible premise, listless improvisation, histrionic performances, and facile stabs at social commentary. A busload of privileged Westerners gets stuck in an abandoned mining village when the driver (Vusi Kunene), operating with a broken compass, drives a full 500 miles into the desert until he runs out of gas. The town's sole inhabitant (Peter Kubheka), a wizened old African who prophetically narrates in the past tense, informs the castaways that the nearest place to get help would require a few days of walking. Nevertheless, the group dispatches its most resourceful member (Miles Anderson) on the mission and subsists on a hazardous supply of canned carrots that have been baking for an eternity under the hot sun. In no time, the marooned maroons—including bickering American (Bruce Davison and Janet McTeer) and British (Chris Walker and Lia Williams) couples, an enigmatic French woman (Romane Bohringer), and the shrewdly sexual Jennifer Jason Leigh—are conspiring against each other. To keep their sanity, a former actor (David Bradley) transcribes King Lear from memory and coerces the reluctant troupe into staging an impromptu production. Much like Survivor, The King Is Alive remains deeply cynical about human nature under adversity, but whereas the popular reality show is deliberately rigged for conflict, Levring's manipulations are contemptibly fictional. In true Dogma style, he breaks down the phony façade of modern civilization through phonier mechanics, such as the frequent cutaways to the "primitive" African observer shaking his head as his visitors lose their bearings. Dogma 95 and its rigid "Vows Of Chastity" were designed to strip away the artifice of technique to access truth, but the result of The King Is Alive is just the opposite.