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Cannes Film
Review: Lars von Trier’s
‘The House That Jack Built’
By Owen Gleiberman, Chief Film Critic Variety,
Matt Dillon is spooky and possessed in Lars von
Trier's serial-killer drama, a movie that keeps you grimly absorbed and shut out
at the same time.
It's halfway
between a subversive good movie and a stunt. It's designed to get under your
skin, and does.
The story follows Jack, a highly intelligent
serial killer over the course of 12 years and depicts the murders that truly
develop Jack as a serial killer.
Director: Lars von Trier With:
Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley
Keough, Jeremy Davies. Release Date: May 14,
2018 CREDIT: Courtesy Zentropa
There’s a
transcendently creepy image in “The
House That Jack Built,” Lars von
Trier’s two-and-half-hour drama starring Matt Dillon as a serial killer in the late ’70s.
The movie is divided into five “incidents” — the word used by
Jack (Dillon), a
loner and failed architect in the Pacific Northwest, to describe the gruesome
banquet of homicide he orchestrates and improvises, each act of hideous violence
made different from the last (though he thinks of all of them as works of
art).
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.
Okay, that’s horrible. But the truly creepy moment
arrives after that. Jack takes the corpses to the walk-in
freezer where he stores the bodies of all his victims. He waits until rigor
mortis is setting in and then, using tools, he sets one of the boy’s faces so
that it looks…just so. We get a glimpse of it: The face is now fixed with a
hideous bloody grin, so that the boy resembles a dead tween version of the
Joker. That’s a memorable image of the evil men are capable
of.

“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. (This is a movie that features, in scene after scene, the world’s
dumbest cops.) Shot in the stripped-down, naturalistic
hand-held manner that gives von Trier’s films their immediacy, but also leaves
you with the feeling that he’s making up scenes as he goes along, “The
House That Jack Built” presents a murder junkie
of cold-eyed lunacy and raging indifference who the movie doesn’t necessarily
want you to understand.
There’s an integrity to that, since serial
killers are weirdly wired animals. It’s folly, on some level, to try and
“explain” them. In “The
House That Jack Built,” Dillon gives a spooky and
possessed performance, one that reaches to the outer limits of a compulsive
murderer’s flat affect and lunar oddity. At first he’s a volatile nerd, in
buttoned-up shirts and aviator frames (very Dahmer) and plastered-down hair, who
talks and talks his way into a victim’s house. (He’s so nutjob obsessive that if
you listen long enough, the crazy patter starts to turn manipulative.) His Jack puts on an imitation of emotions and then wears them like
a badly fitting set of clothes. He also strangles, stabs, mutilates, and fires
bullets in full-metal-jacket casings. He has no feeling for others, and that’s
what haunts us: Looking at Jack, we don’t feel a thing — or, rather, we feel an
absence of empathy that mirrors his own.
When von
Trier walked into the theater of the Palais just before the world
premiere of “The
House That Jack Built,” the audience greeted him with a standing
ovation that lasted for five minutes. The warm welcome
seemed to be a way of saying: All is forgiven. We still love you. And now more
than ever, we need an auteur like you. What the festival needed, after an
opening week as bereft of headlines as this one, was a big bang, and “The
House That Jack Built” delivered it — though
given that it features an intensely compelling movie star as a human butcher,
and serves up his crimes with a glare that’s as matter-of-fact as it is intense,
it hardly needed to be a great work to provide that. When a hundred people
walked out of the screening midway through, to von
Trier that must have been the equivalent of cheers and
applause.

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. It’s designed to get under your
skin, and does. 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.
The opening episode sets the tone: Jack is driving along in his hand-painted,
windowless cherry-red van, and he picks up a woman whose car has broken down,
played by Uma Thurman with a
flirtatious hostility that seems almost designed to goad someone into becoming a
serial killer. Jack has never murdered anyone before (has he thought about it?
We aren’t told), but it doesn’t take long for him to smash her face in with a
broken car jack — which makes us think, after a thousand movies and “Law &
Order” episodes: How is he going to get away with this?
The lackadaisical crime-hunt dimension gets explained by the pre-forensic
’70s setting. And also, to a degree, by the kind of luck that’s part of what
lends serial killers their confidence: When a state line favors Jack’s quick
hiding of Thurman’s car, or when (after the second incident) he drags the
victim’s body along the road, face down, from the back of his van, which seems
like an act of grandiose self-sabotage, and then watches the rain wash away the
trail of blood and flesh he has left behind, it’s as if something in the cosmos
were looking out for him. Jack creates a serial-killer handle for himself —
“Mr. Sophistication” — and von
Trier keeps playing David
Bowie’s “Fame,”
though it’s a ham-handed device, since the notion that serial killers seek
celebrity is a cliché (and one that’s not necessarily borne out by what we see
here).
If you’re sensing that there might just be a tinge of sadism toward women in
“The
House That Jack Built,” von
Trier, in this case, is both guilty as hell and — to a degree —
bizarrely off the hook. Because, of course, it’s the character’s sadism. Then
again, the question has to be asked: Is von Trier reveling in the misogynistic
bad vibes? Is he getting off on it? That’s a gut call, and my gut in this case
says no. That said, the fourth incident, which features Riley Keough, will leave you squirming with a
discomfort that veers distressingly close to a torture-porn hangover. Keough’s
Jaqueline — or as Jack, with rank distaste, calls her, “Simple”
— is a young woman who dresses like a prostitute for a date with Jack. He comes
over, and though he’s faking a leg injury, he’s no longer the geek. He’s
stronger and more virile, and he’s got his victim where he wants her. But when
he pulls down her top and begins to draw dotted cutting lines around her
breasts, we think, “Oh, no…” And the movie follows through on our
dread.
There have been a handful of films over the decades that have
lured us inside the lives of serial killers. “The
Boston Strangler” did it 50 years ago. 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.
Instead, we’re meant to stare right through him and lock into a cathartic
kinship with von
Trier, whose impulse toward subversion is working through Jack.
From the start, Jack carries on a dialogue, heard on the soundtrack, with Verge
(Bruno Ganz), a kind of metaphysical therapist confessor for serial killers
through the ages; he’s like God crossed with the caretaker in “The
Shining.” He has heard it all, and he greets Jack’s rationalization
of his actions with a weary dose of Euro mockery. But what we’re really
listening to is von
Trier have a debate with himself.
The film keeps pausing for lectures: on the fermenting of grapes, the
architecture of cathedrals, the Stuka dive-bomber, and the Nazi concentration
camps (which plays as von
Trier’s not-so-subtle apologia for his remarks seven years ago.)
Jack, in each case, is justifying his actions, treating murder as an art form.
Whereas Verge keeps telling him that true art requires love. I think the
meaning of all this is that Lars von
Trier knows he’s no longer creating films that are fueled by
compassion, the way that “Breaking
the Waves” was. He has become an artist of anger, of addiction, of
the kinkiest extremes. And so now, he allies his view with that of a killer. “The
House That Jack Built” ends with an epilogue that feels as if it
starts over five times. von
Trier keeps trying to figure out how to deliver Jack into hell. But
he dithers about it so much that the only message the movie leaves you with is
that he doesn’t want to let go of him.
Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of
Competition), May 14, 2018. Running time: 155 MIN.
Synopsis
USA in the 1970s. We follow the highly intelligent Jack over a span of 12
years and are introduced to the murders that define Jack’s development as a
serial killer.
Production: An IFC Films release of a
Zentropa, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image, Cophenhagen Film Fund,
Eurimages, Film I Väst, Film und Medien Stiftung NRW, Nordisk Film &
TV Fond production, in cooperation with Concorde Filmverleih, Danmarks Radio,
Les Films du Losange, MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Nordisk Film
Distribution, Potemkine, and Sveriges Television, with support from Danish Film
Institute, Swedish Film Institute.
Producers: Louise
Vesth, Jonas Bagger, Marianne Slot.
Executive
producers: Piv Bernth, Peter Aalbaek Jensen.
Crew:
Director,
screenplay: Lars von
Trier. Camera (color, widescreen): Manuel
Alberto Claro Editor: Molly Marlene
Stensgaard Music: Victor Reyes With:
Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley
Keough, Jeremy Davies.
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