The film finds von Trier wrestling with the claims of misogyny and misanthropy that have followed him his entire career, but not in the way you’d expect. If anything, he leans into both, daring you to look into the abyss with him as he interrogates his own dark side and banishes himself to the underworld. In five episodes, failed architect and vicious sociopath Jack recounts his elaborately orchestrated murders -- each, as he views them, a towering work of art that defines his life's work as ... But, of course, despite pleas to see it as a Trumpian allegory, Jack is more of a stand-in for von Trier himself. He not only envisions his elaborate murders as works of art but arranges the bodies afterwards into an increasingly morbid tableau. He keeps the corpses in a giant walk-in freezer, and delights in moving them around like, well, a director moves actors on a screen.
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He kills both sons with a rifle before forcing the woman to have a picnic with their corpses. He allows the mother to run, but she allows herself to be shot by Jack. Jack fashions Grumpy's corpse into a sculpture with a grisly smile.
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The House That Jack Built received polarized reviews from critics, and criticism for its graphic violence. About 10 minutes before Matt Dillon whacks Uma Thurman across the face with a car jack in “The House That Jack Built,” I was thinking about the last time I really didn’t want to see a movie. And the winner was each of my afternoons spent with an installment of “The Human Centipede” torture trilogy. There’s something about knowing that you’re minutes away from watching a psycho surgically conjoin a stranger’s face to a different stranger’s rump that makes you want to be someplace else. Jack has killed women, mainly women, and in a gloatingly sadistic manner – he has dismembered them and kept their body parts as souvenirs. But the most purely evil thing he has ever done is shown in flashback when Jack, as a boy, amputates the foot of a sweet yellow duckling with a pair of pliers, and then places the poor animal back in the water to watch it wobble round and round.
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Cinema’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier, is back with one of his most challenging and confrontational films in a career not exactly known for playing it safe. Notorious for a Cannes response that included both a standing ovation and hundreds of walk-outs, “The House That Jack Built” is finally available to American audiences, in limited release and on VOD in a slightly-edited R-rated cut. The “thrust” of von Trier’s vision remains to such a degree that it’s even hard to believe this version got an R (which raises the key question of “why bother cutting it at all?” but that’s for another piece). It’s one that compares artistry with murder as the director draws direct lines between creating art and taking lives.
Offended, Jack bludgeons her with the tire jack and stores her body in an industrial freezer inside a factory building he purchased from a pizzeria. In the fifth incident, Jack has detained six men in his freezer, intending to kill all of them with a single bullet. One of the men, an army veteran, informs Jack that he has the wrong ammunition. He goes to get the right ammunition from a friend, SP. SP phones the police, since they're looking for Jack, who then stabs SP through the throat.
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No, it is all leading up to the final Death Metal Gustave Doré sequence, which gives the whole movie the structure and rhythm of an outrageously ambitious shaggy-dog joke. The giganticism of its coda puts the long, slow, nasty drear of what has gone before into a sort of perspective, and it is ingenious in its way, but like so much of what Von Trier does, the bang is like bursting a paper bag. But afterwards it doesn’t stay in your mind, other than to make you shake your head at its distinctive humourless silliness. Some versions use "cheese" instead of "malt", "judge" instead of "priest", "rooster" instead of "cock", the archaic past tense form "crew" instead of "crowed", "shook" instead of "tossed", or "chased" in place of "killed". Also in some versions the horse, the hound, and the horn are left out and the rhyme ends with the farmer. In the third incident, Jack brings his girlfriend and her two sons, "Grumpy" and George, on a hunting trip.
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And Jack is something of an obsessive-compulsive, another trait he likely shares with a man who made a movie like “The Five Obstructions” (in which a director had to follow specific rules like, well, a serial killer who needs his crimes to be executed to perfection). And von Trier has been accused of misogyny on-screen and off, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Jack’s victims are mostly naïve women, although it's sometimes hard to watch. There’s a transcendently creepy image in “The House That Jack Built,” Lars von Trier’s two-and-a-half-hour drama starring Matt Dillon as a serial killer in the late ’70s.
American Psycho Meets Hostel in 'The House That Jack Built' [Review] - Modern Horrors
American Psycho Meets Hostel in 'The House That Jack Built' [Review].
Posted: Fri, 30 Nov 2018 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Film Review: ‘The House That Jack Built’
It’s undeniably too long (153 minutes), often meandering through the same points over and over again in a way that becomes numbing, but there’s something more complex here than I think its critics are willing to see. Don’t get me wrong, I understand not being willing to dig through the horrors of this movie, and/or presuming there’s nothing to unearth, especially given von Trier’s track record of playful misanthropy. But von Trier remains a fascinating conundrum to me—a director who sees violence and pain on the same artistic spectrum as love and joy. Some might look at “The House That Jack Built” and say it’s completely lacking in the empathy we so often want from our artists, but I think von Trier would disagree, arguing that empathy requires understanding the entire human condition and not just its good side. But there is an awful lot of boring talking, talking, talking, dialogue in American-English-Google-translated-from-Danish. Characterisation and narrative events that look improbable rather than mysterious or strange.
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And in 1986, Michael Mann’s “Manhunter,” the most accomplished thriller of the modern era, turned Tom Noonan into the greatest psycho since “Psycho” — and part of the horror was that we got to know him. But “The House That Jack Built” never gets us to fully identify with Dillon’s Jack. The movie is constructed from his point of view (there’s no one else’s), but he’s too much of a sicko not to draw back from. Jack’s crimes get more insanely violent and reprehensible, and nothing is off limits for von Trier. Jack murders a woman in her living room, guns down a family on a hunting trip, and in the film’s most misguided sequence, cuts off the breasts of a woman he has verbally berated and nicknamed “Simple” (Riley Keough).
That moment was the culmination of his transition from artist to punk provocateur who wore the snarky perversity of his aggression like an armband. In the first incident, Jack encounters an abrasive woman on a rural road who needs to fix her broken jack to repair a flat tire. She irritates Jack, saying he looks like a serial killer, insulting him, and then stating he is too much of a wimp to kill anyone.
This is a film that stolidly withholds the horror-thrill that almost any other kind of serial killer film will give you – from The Silence of the Lambs, to Saw, or Seven, or Zodiac, or Kind Hearts and Coronets. And it doesn’t have the pure gonzo-grossout ecstasy of The Human Centipede, although I suspect that Von Trier may have had that in the back of his mind for its final victims. Von Trier, for a while now, has winked at the way that he himself projects the spirit of a killer. The characters in his films — Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves,” Björk in “Dancer in the Dark,” just about everyone in “Dogville” — have often ended up dying in what feels like the director’s ritualized acts of execution.
Von Trier, to me, hasn’t made anything close to a masterpiece since “Breaking the Waves,” in 1996, and “The House That Jack Built” doesn’t spoil that record. It’s halfway between a subversive good movie and a stunt. But it would have gotten under your skin more if it offered a humane counterpart to Jack — if it didn’t remain so fixated on Matt Dillon’s disaffected zombie drone. Originally conceived as a television project by von Trier, The House That Jack Built began production in Sweden in 2016. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, marking von Trier's return to the festival after more than six years.
In one of these atrocities, he has been out for an afternoon hunting with his “family” — a woman (Sofie Gråbøl) he’s seeing and her two young sons — and, in a shocking moment, he stands in a rifle tower and guns down both boys. The second murder is a shot to the head that, in its suck-in-your-breath way, evokes the JFK assassination. There have been a handful of films over the decades that have lured us inside the lives of serial killers.
Actually, he couldn’t be a killer, she reasons, because he’s a “wimp.” Lots of people die in this movie — and, metaphor alert, a breast even becomes a change purse — but Thurman’s delivery of that word might be the most murderous thing that happens. “The House That Jack Built,” however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive. And that’s not just because a lot of it doesn’t track along the spectrum of reality-based storytelling. So, is “The House That Jack Built” hollow provocation or dense commentary?
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