Review of The House That Jack Built (2018) by David L — 16 Dec 2018

It is becoming difficult to write about any politically pertinent films without mentioning the names Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler. Rarely do such films actively draw parallels between the director himself and these reviled heads of state, but Lars von Trier is no stranger to invoking Nazis in order to court controversy or public disdain. In his brief introduction to the "unrated director's cut" of his new film The House that Jack Built simulcast in American theaters for one night only, he unceremoniously clarified where his true sympathies lay when he told the audience "...and remember America: never another Trump." Despite this, he has no qualms with making the central character Jack, an obsessive-compulsive serial killer (played by Matt Dillon) who considers himself an artist, venerates the Third Reich, and happens to be an obvious stand-in for the director.

Divided into a series of five incidents with an abundance of educational and philosophical asides, the movie follows Jack recounting various murders he committed as he is being escorted down to Hell by the Roman poet Virgil (played by Bruno Ganz, an actor who's most famous role was Hitler in Der Untergang by no small coincidence). It's an inversion of The Divine Comedy in a sense, chock full of allegorical explorations of art, politics, and von Trier's own labyrinthine psyche. In one segment Jack utilizes many of the bumbling rhetorical strategies that aided Trump's rise to power while trying to gain access to a victim's house. Later, he gives a single mother and her children red baseball caps in an obvious nod to the MAGA merchandise before using the family as target practice. It's a wonderful metaphor for the grim prospects that await the working class under neo-liberalism and a myopic culture that worships the gun. Then you have every character being so incapable of accepting Jack as a serial killer until it's too late which sounds a lot like our culture's refusal to accept that the biggest perpetrators of terror attacks in America are Caucasian men.

Beyond that, there are many sequences that serve as blatant abstract analysis of some of the criticisms lobbed at von Trier throughout his career. He finally gets a chance to explain the Nazi comments that got him banned from Cannes for several years through sophisticated discussion of iconography. Whether it clarifies anything is anyone's guess. One of the incidents probes his mistreatment of female characters and the actresses who play them. The scene ends up being one of the slimiest and unsettling in his oeuvre regarding that very subject, and props to Riley Keough for putting up with it. Throughout the film, Virgil serves as a voice of reason, interjecting in Jack's eloquently insane philosophical musings and theories while giving honest, if somewhat dismissive counterpoints. Yet somehow Jack's insistent amorality and veneration for "the noble rot" of man's soul always seems to cut through the lesser points that mankind has the capacity to love and help one another.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the film is how outright funny it is. I would go so far as to say that it's the most "enjoyable" (I'm using the term loosely) film of his since Dancer in the Dark. This wasn't a difficult feat as many of his films are unremittingly depressing, but it's hard not to laugh at a serial killer ranting about how nobody has the kindness to help each other out these days. It helps if you prepared for this onslaught of black humor like I did with a steady diet of John Waters and Todd Solondz films beforehand.

Despite its shocking imagery and sometimes pretentious rambling, the film always returns to a tonal stasis, Dillon's performance is entrancing, and bar some goofy CGI near the end, the film is beautiful. I'm reticent to call it a masterpiece as it's so self-aggrandizing, but there's just so much here to chew on. It reminds me of Michael Haneke's film Happy End from earlier this year. Both films come off as swan songs by masters of their craft. Aside from an oddly retrospective sequence, a highlight reel from movies throughout von Trier's filmography, if we are to take Jack as an allegory for the director, his failure in intent as an architect and the resulting "house" would mirror von Trier accomplishing not what he set out decades ago to make, but nonetheless a satisfying artistic statement in his eyes. Somewhere in this pointed metaphor he's built, I'm picking up on a kind of disappointment infused with a nihilistic pride in the fact he's irreparably affected the history of cinema. Perhaps the theatrical cut will improve on some the films faults, but as it stands it has been one of my most satisfying theater going experiences this year.