The House That Jack Built (2018)
Directed by Lars von Trier
Failed architect, engineer and vicious murderer Jack narrates the details of some of his most elaborately orchestrated crimes, each of them a towering piece of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer for twelve years.
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3 films that influenced The House That Jack Built
What critics say influenced The House That Jack Built
Von Trier’s “Golden Heart” trilogy—starting with Breaking the Waves in 1996 and continuing with The Idiots in 1998 and the musical Dancer in the Dark in 2000—derives its title from the saintly women each film centers on.
I told him how much I liked Anti-Christ and Melancholia , while also confessing that I absolutely hated The Idiots.
Von Trier’s setups are so brutal as to be almost abstract, and nowhere does he use storytelling and image-making to discuss the concepts of society and humanity more bluntly and intellectually than in his 2003 epic Dogville.
Think not only Watson in Breaking the Waves but Nicole Kidman in Dogville, Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia.
I rejected most of Von Trier’s earlier, Brutalist films Breaking the Waves, Zentropa, Dogville, Manderlay as pseudo-profound, forced nihilist conceits.
Whatever got excised, the film’s madness and sadism almost certainly remain: If the carnage is blatantly a stand-in for something else, the characters don’t know that, and von Trier refuses to abstract their terror and despair, any more than he did Nicole Kidman’s trauma in his masterpiece, Dogville , which kept her emotions very real against the Brechtian fakeness of the soundstage setting.
You’d have to look to Paul Verhoeven (“Elle”) for a peer.