Review of The House That Jack Built (2018) by Lola%20 R — 07 Jan 2019

Lars von Trier thinks there is no story that does not deserve to be told. Starting from this premise, the Danish director, one of the exponents of the Dogma movement, walks through the most obscure places of the soul in search of the rottenest in humanity. "The house that Jack built", can be seen as a summary of everything that has been his cinema in the last decades. It is also 2h35min of a movie that only he would reaffirm his critics' view of his sickly misogynist behavior and his flirtations with extremism, and remember that Von Trier has already stated "to understand Hitler", which made him expelled from Cannes when the "Melancholy" (2011) was released.

"The house Jack built," can therefore be seen by at least two prisms. Let's start with the first one.

Von Trier's new film can be seen as an exercise in evil without consequences. In the story, Matt Dillon is Jack, an engineer with ambitions to be an architect who dreams of building a house so perfect that it always seems impossible to build it. But Jack is also a serial killer, who in 12 years killed more than 60 people without ever being caught by the police.

Throughout the film, Jack is developing a theory in a conversation with an entity called Verge (Bruno Ganz) about how artistic his life of crime is. He argues that art comes from pain and evil as Verge understands art as the fruit of love. This dialogue of oppositions is mapping the whole film to each increasingly heinous act of Jack, always accompanied by the attentive but placid look of Verge, a character that only in the end we understand what the role is. And it is curious that this character was made by the same actor who played Hitler in "Der Untergang" (2004). Hard to believe it was a casual choice.

With each murder of Jack, Von Trier goes on to illustrate how evil is banal and how desperate each one is so lonely and finds no echo and no solidarity. He is the Lord Sophistication and develops perfect crimes as long as the population inoperative around and the slowness of the authorities.

At the same time, Von Trier develops the thesis that the serial killer is an individual who is born with evil in him and always leaves clues to every crime. For he wants to be found, discovered. There is a vanity in this fight of cat and mouse, because the killer at some point wants to be discovered to have his "work of art" finally disclosed and gaining public and notoriety.

At the same time, the director exposes that we, as spectators, worship these stories and adulate murderers. It is when the director exposes the images of dictators and mass murderers like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

The film, however, ends up dripping in the end by a long biblical strand that seemed to disagree somewhat with the initial proposal. Had he kept the subtlety of the conversations between Jack and Verge with a less long ending, he would have something better to offer.

But it is impossible to see "The house Jack built" on another prism. A of von Trier's misogyny. In the film, Jack says he murdered all kinds of people, but it's the story of six women he decides to tell Verge, the ones who give him some pleasure. One of them, he considers his great work of art, when he treats a mother and his two small children as a hunt and drops them in a field just to play with them. But it is the woman he decides to torture psychologically before offering her a tragic end.

Von Trier is a well-known torturer of women and seems to have no problem in exposing this. In a passage of the film, when Jack is about to kill Simple (Riley Keough), name that by itself is a great aggression and reductionism to the woman that he said until liking, the director comes to expose a subtext in the script speaking of the injustice that is always blame men for everything, while women are always victims. In times complaints of harassment and a necessary call to female protagonism, Von Trier comes to tell us that he does not care about this. So that does not expose a need to be controversial only by the controversy in something that adds nothing to the film?

Simple is verbally assaulted, humiliated and has the most dreadful and sadistic of deaths. And that reverberates during the film, because Jack turns one of his breasts into a wallet.

But as I said, von Trier is a well-known torturer of women in the movies. Nicole Kidman is humiliated beyond the limit in "Dogville" (2003), causing a huge nuisance. Chalotte Gainsbourg is also taken beyond all boundaries in "Antichrist" (2009) and in the two volumes of "Nymphomaniac" (2013). Björk is also humiliated in "Dancing in the Dark" (2000). The Icelandic singer, even, had problems of relationship with the director. And in "The House Jack Built," Von Trier exposes his women to the utmost of pain and horror. Not just with Simple or one of the nameless women, but also with the first victim (Uma Thurman), murdered with a monkey blow while the director makes a point of exposing the huge hole in the head of the character caused by the car part.

Some might say, and it is a valid argument, that it is all the art of Von Trier. That the actresses keep bumping into working with him and in the case of Charlotte, they make even more than one movie. But when it comes to stop being something punctual to become a brand, and an uncomfortable brand, as it is not a style trait, but a hate speech imputed in their work, becomes a problem.

Thus, "The House Jack Built" does not add anything too new to Von Trier's biopic, which continues releasing its Dogma-style sparks to film, and making their stories follow the same narrative looping of earlier works. Interesting is Dilon's work in the leading role. If there's a spark of value in the film, it's in the sadistic-boring look he set for his Jack and the benefit he had from the ironies of the text to use in his character. But still, "The house Jack built" is far from the best works of Von Trier.