The House That Jack Built
When Lars Von Trier’s THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (2018, Shudder, AMC+, Tubi) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival more than 100 people walked out, but those that stayed gave it a six-minute standing ovation. I wanted to stand and cheer after the second of its five incidents but was tempted to turn it off during the third and the epilogue. It didn’t just polarize different critics. It may well polarize different parts of your mind.
As Jack (Matt Dillon) discusses with Verge (Bruno Ganz) the five key episodes in his life as a serial killer, we see five murders and a few others, along with childhood flashbacks and archival images from history. There’s even a montage of shots from von Trier’s earlier films. The victims include a woman (Uma Thurman) demanding help with a flat tire, a widow (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) Jack follows home from a small-town supermarket, a mother (Sofie Grabel) and her two sons and a girlfriend (Riley Keough).
Oddly, even though the first two murders are the most graphic, it’s the third sequence, in which he kills the children and their mother, that’s most upsetting. There’s a certain Brechtian distancing (pointed to perhaps by Ganz’s quoting the “Alabama Song”) in that you start each segment knowing someone will be murdered, so you’re supposed to focus on how it happens. That works in the first two incidents, which are marvelous little black comedies. Thurman is pushy and over-talkative, going on and on about how foolish she is to get into Dillon’s car while not realizing how foolish it really is. The humor in the second incident is in the way Jack cons his way into Fallon Hogan’s house. It feels improvisational, and the two actors play it to perfection. But the third asks us to believe that Jack has already wormed his way into this little family and cuts from his showing one son how to shoot to his taking them out. It’s monstrous, which is clearly von Trier’s intention, but it’s hard to shake it and enjoy anything left in the film.
There’s also a sense in which the picture is about aestheticizing atrocity. For Jack, killing is an art form. He compares his work not just to Glenn Gould’s performances of Bach and the rise of Gothic architecture, but also to the mass murders inspired by modern history’s dictators. Jack even poses some of his victims before freezing them and takes photos of them. When he isn’t happy with one set of photos, he returns the body to the murder scene to try again, running down an old woman along the way to add a new element to his “art.” Of course, he’s not the most reliable narrator, and the film’s overall plot will put the lie to his pretentions of greatness. With the inclusion of shots from other von Trier films to illustrate the unreliable Jack’s contention that his “art” reflects the horrors and meaninglessness of life, it’s hard to tell if this is representing the director’s view of the world or a critique of his own work.
