The House That Jack Built

The House That Jack Built (2018) covers five of the murders a serial killer committed over twelve years, and he narrates them himself. Jack is an engineer. The person he is telling is called Verge, and a journey continues throughout the conversation. Jack presents his killings as works of art, talking about architecture, materials, design. The idea is to take that defence seriously and then collapse it. Jack keeps describing himself as an artist, and von Trier cuts in footage from his own films, putting the director inside the argument. The Cannes screening was a historical repair: von Trier had been barred from the festival in 2011 over remarks at a press conference and returned seven years later with this. People walked out during the screening and the walkouts were discussed more than the film. Matt Dillon leads, in the most unexpected work of his career. The first section, in a car with a woman, is the most tense passage, and nothing has happened yet. There is a section involving children that is genuinely hard to sit through. The last part abruptly changes form and turns the film into an allegory. It runs 152 minutes. Good for: von Trier, provocation, and formal experiment. Less good for: the violence and the animal scenes are extreme; the film was made to disturb and it succeeds.