The House That Jack Built (2019) - Movie Review

I feel like a john when discussing movies like this. Movies where the main intent at its core is to shock people by any means necessary, in this case made by a man who has basically built an entire career out of playing edgelord for the arthouse crowd. While that methodology has at least brought Lars Von Trier to some actual dramatic engagement on occasion, and even his worst films show a level of effort that is the least I ask for from edgelords (nothing worse than someone trying to shock you while putting in zero effort whatsoever), the man’s status as provocateur makes watching his movies, particularly his most recent ones, feel like I’m just playing into his hand. And unfortunately, the same applies for this one.

Never thought I’d get the chance to make this kind of comparison, but this feels like a Bill Zebub production with an actual budget behind it. It’s a story about a serial killer, framed around five specific killings of his, all of which are so insanely drawn-out, you’d think his preferred method was boring the audience to death. It’s so weakly episodic that it really does have Zebub’s sense of pacing to it at times. The performances are decent, with Matt Dillon holding the cadaver-built fort for its lengthy running time, and the gore effects combined with Manuel Alberto Claro’s snuff-film camera work certainly unsettle on a genre level… but Lars doesn’t want to settle for that.

No, he is once again using his art as his personal soapbox to talk about pretty much anything that comes to mind, largely shown here as the conversation between Dillon’s Jack and Bruno Ganz as the mysterious Verge. It taps into the typical psycho-killer articulation about Jack’s work and his literal psychology, but it also gets into musings about art, morality and gender politics. And oh boy, is this some fucking tacky shit.

I’ll forego labelling any of this as pretentious, because quite frankly that’s a boring angle to take on stuff like this, and instead get out my own scalpel and look at how wrong-headed some of this comes across. Using everything from classic art to his own filmography to make his point, Lars through the mouth of Jack remarks on how people are killing art by putting their own moral compass into their perspective as an observer, basically trying to subvert its own exploitative trappings by claiming to make a point about that very voyeuristic attitude. It’s essentially the same argument Oliver Stone made with Natural Born Killers, and it’s utter bullshit for the exact same reason: It takes a lot of finesse to make judgement calls on people enjoying violent media, in the middle of your own violent media, and there's not nearly enough of it here to make it stick.

It’s like Lars wants to be excused for making his body of work out of looking at human misery, which I would be fine with if said misery had a point to it. Or, at least, a point that didn’t make Lars himself look like a total asshat. Because yeah, when Jack reaches his 4th incident involving Riley Keough, we get ruminations on victimhood and differences between the sexes and how men are more likely to be labelled the ‘aggressor’ in a conflict over women and how much that sucks… fucking hell, was this film released direct-to-MRA-subreddit? What makes this even tougher to deal with is, aside from how much ambiguity sits in how seriously we’re meant to take any of this, it echoes a lot of the uglier statements that showed up in Nymphomania and even Antichrist.

And that’s without getting into the literal descent into Hell that is this film’s finale, which shows enough visual flair that I can give some credit to Lars Von Trier for his film craft, and the point where the film goes full rectal ouroboros. Yeah, there’s thematic reasons for it to do with the titular house, and it admittedly makes for some of the year’s most striking frames, but it’s not enough to reconcile how fart-sniffing the rest of the film is.

The bulk of the film is just overlong and relies way too much on its cast to make it watchable, and the rest of it is a bunch of talking points that retroactively make me thankful that this is the only film of his so far that fits into my review criteria. I can’t say I hated it, but then again, I tend to reserve that reaction for stuff worth hating, something that wonky and ultimately flat provocation doesn't qualify for.