Review #1,437: 'The House That Jack Built' (2018)

Seven years ago, Danish provocateur Lars von Trier found himself banned from the Cannes Film Festival after making a rather ill-timed joke about sympathising with Hitler during a press conference for Melancholia. For a festival that seems to inspire walk-outs and boos from audiences who have apparently never seen a film before, it was never going to be too long until von Trier wriggled his way back in. After all, for a director famous for clitoris-removal and the mocking of disabled people, the lure of free advertising from appalled cinema-goers would surely be too strong to resist. For his return, von Trier brought The House That Jack Built, a two and half hour serial killer movie that often feels like a stand-in for the director's self-satisfied smirk. Not only does the film feature animal cruelty, infanticide and open mocking of the #MeToo movement, but the anti-hero at its centre talks frequently at length about his real obsession. You guessed it: the Third Reich. This is a giant middle-finger to the Cannes board.

Jack (Matt Dillon) is a serial killer who, by the end, boasts more than 60 victims. He mainly kills women, but he also kills men and children if the subject is just right for his unique brand of 'art'. At the start of the film, he discusses his life and the nature of evil with an unseen man, played by Bruno Ganz, who we don't see until the very end. He defends his grisly past-times as artistic expression, claiming that everyone who died at his hands will be forever immortalised in his work. His story is recounted as a series of incidents, the first of which involves Uma Thurman as an impossibly stupid victim stranded by the road-side. Convincing Jack to give her a ride to a nearby garage that can fix her car jack, she almost talks the stranger into killing her, even handing him the murder weapon. When the brutal, sudden murder occurs, we almost feel a sense of relief. You can imagine von Trier stroking his chin and grinning at the thought of us feeling like she deserved it. Over the course of a decade, Jack ponders his favourite kills, taking the occasional detour to discuss architecture, literature and the work of Glenn Gould, and to repeatedly build and knock down his dream house.

For a film that understandably caused outrage at its premiere, The House That Jack Built isn't gory and full of spatter, but that isn't to say the film isn't frequently repugnant. An old lady is strangled to death for comic effect, a duckling has its leg snipped off, and worst of all, a child's corpse is contorted with wires and preserved in Jack's walk-in freezer, positioned in the background of many scenes just in case we happen to forget. Such blatant button-pushing would be forgivable, of even admirable, had this trudging vanity project been remotely convincing. Instead, its two and a half hours that feels two and a half hours, with a miscast Dillon delivering monologues on the beauty of genocide and the evolution of architecture while von Trier plans his next trick to make you feel uncomfortable. The film's best performance is delivered by Riley Keough as a young woman Jack cruelly names Simple. Jack toys with her low self-esteem before dispatching her in a horrendous manner, but there's real humanity lurking in this scene, and a real sense of dread conjured up by von Trier. The whole thing is almost saved by a climactic journey through a Hell seemingly inspired by the covers of death metal albums, which manages to be both truly eerie and cartoonishly comical. But then you remember what you had to get through to get there, and wonder how to get your 150 minutes back.


Directed by: Lars von Trier
Starring: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies
Country: Denmark/France/Germany/Sweden

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie