Lars von Trier (2018)
Widely read and highly intelligent, Jack trained as an architect before he became a serial killer. He considers himself an artist and the murder victims his medium of self-expression. Some critics have interpreted The House That Jack Built as a kind of self-portrait of a writer-director whose previous work has led to accusations of sadism. Although it would be characteristic of Lars von Trier to make a moral leap big enough to draw a parallel between his épatant creations for cinema and actual crimes against humanity, I felt, within a few minutes of the film’s start, that he was more concerned with asking questions of the viewer than with examining his own conscience.
The most basic of these questions is how much of this can you take? The answer in my case was forty minutes. I gave up on The House That Jack Built aware that the same thing happened a few years ago with von Trier’s Antichrist. (That involved a cinema walkout; this time it was just a matter of aborting a rental viewing on Curzon home cinema.) What I didn’t consciously realise until I looked at my Antichrist note was that the clock stopped at the same point each time. If you can’t stand seeing a serial killer in action, von Trier is also asking, why is that – assuming you’re accustomed to watching his like on screen? As with Antichrist, a main reason was boredom and the prospect of more of it to come. The extra length of Jack (155 minutes compared with the 108 of the earlier film) made seeing it through all the more impossible. But fear, anger and revulsion were factors too and it’s worth interrogating those reactions.
The House That Jack Built is divided into five ‘incidents’, each describing a murder committed by Jack (Matt Dillon), followed by an epilogue entitled ‘Katabasis’. (As its name suggests, the epilogue takes place in Hell, through which a hitherto heard but unseen character Verge (Bruno Ganz) is the Virgil figure guiding Jack.) In the first episode, Jack is driving down a road when a woman (Uma Thurman) hails him to stop: her car has broken down and her jack is broken too. In the climax to this incident, Jack suddenly slams the jack into her face, killing her instantly.
The build-up to this begins when the arrogant, entitled woman asks Jack for a lift to the nearby garage he’s recommended and he reluctantly agrees. The moment she gets into the car, she starts speculating about the possibility that he’s a serial killer and she doesn’t stop soon. For anyone who knows the film’s subject in advance this is a meta monologue and, as such, a distancing device. At the same time, the woman is so infuriating that part of you is surprised someone hasn’t murdered her before. Both these feelings intensify the shock of the killing when it happens – it’s a smack in the chops for the audience too. Von Trier stresses the horrible reality of the murder through repeated shots of the woman’s destroyed face. That it’s the face of the beautiful Uma Thurman adds to the effect – though we know that it shouldn’t and perhaps feel ashamed that it does. Once he’s pulled this stunt, you wonder, with annoyance and apprehension (the two things work in synergy), how von Trier is going to top it – as dramatic imperative requires him to do.
The immediate solution, in the second incident, is to create a sharp contrast with the first – in terms of the kind of victim involved and the tempo of her murder. Jack knocks on the door of Claire Miller (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), a woman with everyday rather than movie-star looks. Jack pretends to be a police officer. Claire refuses him entry without seeing evidence of his police ID. After several failed attempts to change her mind and finding out that she is recently widowed, he tells her he’s not a cop but an insurance agent who can get her a better pension deal. Claire lets him in. After complaining how humiliated she made him feel by refusing to admit him, he strangles her. She still shows signs of life so he tries to get her to drink water with pieces of doughnut crumbled in it, to make her choke. This doesn’t work so he strangles her again, then stabs her through the heart. Von Trier follows this with a long, tedious description of Jack’s hyper-meticulous clean-up of the bloody crime scene and virtually every other surface in the house.
The unnamed woman in the first incident is right when she tells Jack he looks like a serial killer. Matt Dillon is a good actor but he’s instantly and intensely creepy – to an extent that no one who crossed Jack’s path and who had seen a (bad) serial-killer movie at some time in their lives could ignore. The viewer’s attention is deflected from this for a few minutes only because Uma Thurman is even more insistently vexing than Dillon is relentlessly unnerving. There’s no such complication when Jack is on Claire Miller’s doorstep – and Siobhan Fallon Hogan’s fine naturalistic acting intensifies the ordeal of waiting for her character to be murdered.
Fallon Hogan’s truthfulness also underlines how improbable the narrative is. As a hard-up widow, Claire might have let Jack in if he’d pretended to be an insurance agent from the start. The viewer knows that his incredible change of tack, after increasing her suspicions throughout the previous five minutes of screen time, would be enough for this woman to shut the door in his face. This isn’t the only thing to suggest that von Trier, like his protagonist, has been stringing the audience along with a nasty ulterior motive. Jack’s clean-up operation may or may not convince us that he has obsessive compulsive disorder (announced by a zany inserted shot of him holding, Bob Dylan-style, a card that reads ‘OCD’) but his if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed slaying of Claire Miller isn’t the work of a homicidal artist. Perhaps von Trier intends Jack’s ineptitude as an ironic sick joke but, if so, it’s a weak one. It has a charge only because the idea of making this a joke is objectionable. For some, resonances between the protagonist’s tactics and his creator’s are evidence that the film is searching self-portraiture. For others, they’re a warning to get out of The House That Jack Built.
6 January 2019
