Mark Reviews Movies: THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 14, 2018

It might sound like an insult to say that The House That Jack Built is a reflection of writer/director Lars von Trier's psyche. This is, after all, a movie about a serial killer, who tells the stories of five of the over 60 murders he has committed over the course of his life. It might seem mean to compare the filmmaker to the character, except that Von Trier makes a point of doing it for us.

Anyone familiar with the director's output knows that his work more than often deals with cruelty—people's cruelty against themselves and others, as well as nature and fate's uncaring cruelty against humanity. The serial killer at the core of this movie has determined that such cruelty is the foundation of the purest form of art.

During one of the murderer's long rants on the subject, Von Trier offers a montage, in which the images serve as examples of the murderer's way of thinking about the relationship between cruelty and art. All of them are scenes from the filmmaker's previous films.

We might have suspected that Von Trier was talking about himself or his work throughout most of the movie. Then, he makes it explicit that, indeed, Jack (a chilling Matt Dillon), the serial killer, is a stand-in for himself. The movie isn't a confession, of course, but it is a confessional about how Von Trier thinks (as if we couldn't have figured that out after his decades of making movies), as well as an apologia for how that way of thinking has been reflected in his output.

Von Trier's films always have been indulgent (from the ones with a strict adherence to realism, to the ones that played with those rules, and to his more recent work, with surreal flourishes and blatant philosophical asides). He has toyed with referencing his own work in the past, mostly as a sort of inside joke, but the self-reference has never been as clear or as purposeful as it is here. This is easily his most self-indulgent movie.

That's not necessarily a negative. At this point in detailing the movie, it's simply an observation—one that Von Trier wants us to consider. Jack is a murderer, manipulating his intended victims (The overwhelming majority of the ones we see, by the way, are women, and the exceptions are a pair of kids) and staging the bodies for what he believes are artistic photographs. It's not really murder in his mind. It's gathering the materials to create art.

Behind the camera, Von Trier is the filmmaker, manipulating circumstances and characters (making all of the women, by one character's description, "stupid" and the police, according to the same character, "naïve") so that Jack can do his murderous deeds and get away with them. The result, in Von Trier's mind, is more than exploitation. It, too, is art—especially if he makes his motive explicit.

The result is an occasionally absorbing and constantly horrifying dance between the art and the artist. The five "incidents," as they're called in intertitles, follow Jack as he selects victims, by coincidence or seemingly at random, and earns just enough of their trust to take advantage of it.

One victim is a woman, played by Uma Thurman, whose car has a flat tire and who annoys Jack enough to receives a couple of blows to the face by a jack. Another victim is a widow, played by Siobhan Fallon Hogan, who lets Jack into her house after he promises her an increase in her pension (When a cop shows up later, Jack drags her body behind his speeding van, until her face disappears). Another is a mother, played by Sofie Gråbøl, who brings her two sons along for a hunting trip with Jack, who then practices "ethical hunting" on the family. The last is a woman whom Jack calls "Simple," played by Riley Keough, and upon whom he performs a forced mastectomy.

A final setup, a "tribute" to Nazi soldiers trying to find the most efficient way to kill multiple people with one bullet, is threatened by the police. We can't gauge Von Trier's perspective on the suspense here: Is it in fearing Jack will succeed or be stopped?

The violence is disturbing, to say the least (One dreads what the director's cut, which does exist, left in), but even more so is the dissection of Jack's mind. For all of the digressions about art and philosophy, which seem quite far-fetched at first, almost all of them eventually get to some core component of how Jack thinks about life and murder. They're not monologues, though. They're dialogues between Jack and the poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), whom Jack calls "Verge" and who believes that art should be a reflection of love. Jack thinks his companion, accompanying the killer to Hell (while Von Trier takes us on a trip through a certain kind of hell), is an overly moral busybody.

It's odd, if kind of fascinating, to see and hear a filmmaker having such an open conversation with himself (not to mention having a one-sided one with his critics). The House That Jack Built may serve as a thesis for Von Trier's filmmaking philosophy, but given the foundation of that thesis, maybe it would have been better if he kept some of this stuff to himself.

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