Lars Von Trier's 'The House That Jack Built' Is Repulsive, Toxic Trash [Cannes Review]

Kiss your children. Go for a walk in the park. Eat a tomato like it’s an apple. Attach a love letter to your payment for the gas bill. Throw some pebbles into a fountain. Learn a few phrases in Xhosa. Defrost the freezer. Do anything — it really doesn’t matter what — rather than go and see Lars Von Trier‘s “The House That Jack Built.” And if you were born under the kind of unlucky star that mandates you have to go see Lars Von Trier’s “The House That Jack Built,” (say, for professional reasons) do any/all of those things anyway. You’ll need the memory of the good times washing out your wheelie bin or filing your taxes to get you through the two hours and 35 minutes ahead, though it will have to be a pretty fucking potently joyous memory, possibly involving puppies in a springtime meadow, that will sustain you during the bit where Matt Dillon slices one of Riley Keough‘s breasts off.

This irredeemably unpleasant movie is divided into five “incidents” and an epilogue set in hell that, with remarkable verisimilitude I guess, goes on for roughly eternity. Dillon plays the eponymous killer Jack, (“titular” feeling even wronger than usual given the end of that last paragraph), with all the flair and charisma of an old Volvo. The first incident depicts him reluctantly helping out “Lady 1” as she is primly yet reductively described in the press notes — a shrewish, entitled megabitch whose car jack has broken while she’s been trying to change her tire. Lady 1 is played by Uma Thurman, who is very bad here despite having been so very good in Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” and whose absence at this film’s gala premiere went unnoticed by precisely nobody.

In awkwardly scripted and dully repetitive scenes, architect/engineer Jack drives Lady 1 back and forth to the blacksmith to get her jack fixed, while she prattles away about how he’s probably a serial killer and provides him with a host of good ideas about how to murder her, before emasculating him so thoroughly that really Jack has little choice but to stave her head in. The broken Jack uses the broken jack to batter her to death, and compares the result, in one of those flash-cut montages of which von Trier is so fond, to a Picasso. Murder is a cathedral, or a pointed arch, or art or something! Also, Goethe sat under the oak tree that grew in Buchenwald concentration camp and William Blake wrote about tigers and lambs — such are the lofty topics discussed in Jack’s voiced-over conversation with Verge, as in Virgil, writer of The Aeneid and Dante’s guide to hell, here played by Bruno Ganz, an actor whose two most famous roles are Hitler and an angel.

Jack, who self-dubs as “Mr. Sophistication” and also suffers from OCD which makes for some wackily wearying hi-jinks, develops a taste for killing women, taking pictures of their posed and propped up bodies and then storing them in a walk-in freezer unit he happens to own. “Lady 2” and “Lady 3” respectively are played by Siobhan Fallon Hogan and Sophie Gråbøl, though there’s another woman murdered in between who doesn’t even get a number, let alone her own “incident.” But then perhaps namelessness would have been preferable for Riley Keough’s dim sexpot character who is actually in a relationship with Jack and whom he insists on calling “Simple.” Even before the mammary mutilation scene that is destined to live on in infamy, his verbal and psychological abuse of Simple is among the film’s ickiest elements, which is saying something considering there are also scenes of amateur taxidermy in which the body of a small boy is crudely fashioned into a little statue wearing a grotesque, carved-in grin.

And all the while, in between, there are lengthy digressions, animations and newsreel montages on Art and Iconography and History and Literature that are as incoherent and self-serving as the rest of the film is repulsive. So the structure is a kind of “Human Centipede” ass-to-mouth concertina of gruesome misogyny and utter tedium. And, hey, skip me the “he’s not being misogynistic, he’s making a point about misogyny” line because while that has washed with certain previous films from this controversy-generating machine, it is simply not the case here.

Von Trier has been trolling us for a while now. But never before has that uncontrollable impulse of his been so little justified by the filmmaking (even Von Trier’s ace “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac” collaborator, DP Manuel Alberto Claro, seems to be phoning it in here). And never has it felt this pointed, this personal and this radioactive with virulently infectious self-loathing. Here are just a few of the interest groups he works hard to offend repeatedly: women; law enforcement; anyone who’s ever defended him or one of his movies in the past (boy do we feel like idiots now); all his actors; people with children; people who were once children; art historians; classical scholars; Glenn Gould fans; serial killers; people with eyes; everyone who applauded him as he arrived at the film’s premiere; ducks; and of course the Cannes Film Festival selection committee. Sitting in a room with the very people who banned von Trier “for life” (actually 7 years) from this festival because of comments he made about understanding Hitler, and watching the long sequence in which Jack extols the brilliance of Nazi architect Albert Speer, over documentary footage of Speer and Adolf yukking it up, was certainly one of the more epic meta-trolls I’ve ever been privy to.

All of which guarantees that this tawdry, nasty little movie is destined to immediately attain cult status as a dog whistle for the particular brand of filmbro who will wear it as a badge of honor that somehow they “get” it in a way that snowflake critics such as myself simply do not. The irony and the smallest of comforts in the dark days of hot takes to come, is that if there’s one thing that “The House That Jack Built” proves beyond all doubt, it’s that as much as Von Trier has contempt for all of the abovementioned segments of society, there are no people on earth he despises more than those who would make themselves his accomplices. That’s why he builds in such eviscerating self-critique (particularly in the form of Ganz’ character) even while he can’t stop agitating, pushing buttons, ringing the bell and running away. This house is being built to be torn down.

In the past, Von Trier has been defensible on the grounds of his undeniable filmmaking talent and because so much of his nihilism clearly sprang from a place of intense personal pain and depression. This film, however, goes so much further in its overt horribleness that it feels like the director is standing in the middle of the road over its mutilated corpse waving a bloody knife and begging the police to arrest him. In which case the least helpful reaction we can have, and I say this as a fan of many of his previous films, is to pull back and stroke our chins and work out how to call it Art. Perhaps Von Trier wants to be released from his enslavement to his own compulsive, schoolboy need to provoke and offend but doesn’t know how. Perhaps “The House That Jack Built” is the kind of film you make when you fervently want someone to stop you, to save you from yourself and the demons of your worst nature. Perhaps, this time, we should oblige. [F]

P.S. Hi there to the first #filmbrodude who devastates everyone with his witty bravado by replying with some variation on “wow, even more stoked to see this now!” Your prize is: you are a douchebag. xxx

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