The allegorical and metaphorical significance of the images within THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT have been exhaustively discussed. There is a brief detour from this abuse – but as Jack’s focus is shifted to children, it doesn’t give much relief. As with any film that deals with “extreme” elements, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT contains violence almost exclusively against women. Some Incidents, however, strike an honest and familiar nerve.įor many women who are fans of Lars Von Trier, the film has forced a sort of reckoning within. He is a completely unreliable narrator, and the stories he tells seem at times too fantastical to be real. The story is told in such a way that the audience consistently questions the validity of Jack’s story. No matter how cruel and sadistic his act, Jack veers the subject toward the virtue of his art. As Jack tells Virge his story in five “Incidents,” he insists that he has committed art, not murder. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT is a statement on art and how people interpret that art. Viewers are forced to contend with the age-old question: “Can you separate the artist from the art?” The director’s career has been muddied by claims of alleged sexual harassment and media mishaps that have allowed critics to blanket-label Von Trier as a misogynist and Nazi sympathizer. This is due to both content within his films and without. Von Trier’s films have never been easily accessible. These elephants in the room are addressed through a philosophical and somewhat over-indulgent voice-over whilst Jack is led through Dante’s Inferno-style circles of hell by Virge (Bruno Ganz), a mostly disembodied surrogate for the viewer and their questions and counterpoints. The meta nature of THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT would be lost only to a viewer completely unfamiliar with Von Trier’s previous films, and most will recognize the self-referential scene where Jack tosses away placards expressing aspects of his personality that the film community and critics have focused on.Įgotism. Jack (Matt Dillon) is undoubtedly the closest to a Von Trier avatar presented in his filmography. Throughout THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (2018) it seems as though Von Trier is using the titular psychopath/artist as a catalyst to address every assumed aspect of his complicated personality. It is, instead, the most deadening and dispiriting film that its director has yet made.Artist, misogynist, Nazi, romantic, nihilist – can an auteur be all things at once? In Lars Von Trier’s case, he can be most things, though he vehemently insists that Nazi is not one. Lasting two and a half hours, this is neither a conventional crime drama nor a self-reflexive essay film. Often, his jokes – if they are intended as such – fall flat. At one stage, he throws in archive footage of the Nazis, as well as stock images of predators in the natural world.īut despite some laughter in the dark, The House That Jack Built soon begins to drag. He seems to dare viewers to laugh at events that could not be crueller or more bleak. Von Trier relishes combining banality (cars breaking down, weapons not working) with evil. Occasionally, The House That Jack Built is funny in its own dark and deadpan way. The same description could be applied to Jack. “I’m a serial neurotic, a hypochondriac, and I’m frightened of everything I can’t control,” the director once said of himself. Von Trier is riddled with strange compulsions and preoccupations. The killer is perhaps intended as the director’s own alter ego.
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