The House that Jack Built

Lars Von Trier has problems. A brief study of his filmography makes that very clear. He’s a depressive, he’s misanthropic, he’s angry, he’s tactless, he’s navel-gazing and he’s very willing to mess with the audience in seeing just how much they are willing to take. He’s also a fascinating filmmaker. “The House that Jack Built” is probably not the best example of his filmography – this story of a serial killer presented in five incidents tends to draw out some of his most unpleasant characteristics, as the horrors tend to repeat, linger and grow more extreme in ways that are not at all easy to take. But there’s also an ongoing commentary between the titular Jack (Matt Dillon) and an overheard voice, Verge (Bruno Ganz), on the nature of this behaviour, on art, on society, on the creative act and on what it all might mean. And the last twenty minutes or so, when the repeating pattern ends and the film goes somewhere else, are kinda extraordinary. I can’t necessarily recommend this to people very easily (the subject matter and the way it goes about playing that subject matter means that for vast amounts of people the first two hours or so of this film will be pretty indigestible). And I can probably imagine that to many people this will come off as irredeemably pretentious. But dammit, this is my kinda pretentious.