The House That Jack Built review: Lars von Trier shocks with a portrait of the artist as serial killer

Dir: Lars von Trier; Starring: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Riley Keough, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gr?b?l. Cert 18, 155 mins.

Seven years ago, Lars von Trier was drummed out of Cannes for joking in a press conference that he sympathised with Hitler. This year he came back, persona non grata status rescinded, with a film whose hero claims to sympathise with – well, have a guess. 

Around three quarters of the way through the Krypton Factor run of degradation that is The House That Jack Built, serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon) rejects the theory that art is a kind of emergency pressure valve for humankind – something that allows artists and audiences alike to make contact with ideas they would never dare carry out in life.

Oh no, says Jack, over documentary clips of actual massacres, including footage from a concentration camp of piles of Holocaust victims’ bodies being bulldozed into pits. Anything an artist can think of, no matter how morally rancid, you can guarantee someone else will have thought of it first, and done it for real. “You kill art by imposing your moral rules on it!” he rants at his interlocutor Verge (Bruno Ganz), who at this point we still only know by the croak of his voice in the dark. “Art is vaster than we could ever understand.”

No doubt. But The House That Jack Built is not: rather, it is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.

The film is a (self) portrait of the artist as serial killer, and is structured around five “incidents” drawn from Jack’s murderous career, all of which are presented as creative acts, each one more conceptually ambitious and harder to watch than the last. As if it even needs to be said, these are not particularly pleasant: one, which involves the mocking desecration of a child’s corpse, I found particularly hard to take, not least because for the remainder of the film, the results are repeatedly glimpsed in the background, like a running joke.

Jack seems to go into mass murder on a whim. He stops to help an unnamed woman (Uma Thurman) whose car has broken down, she glances at his odd red van, laughs “You might as well be a serial killer,” and he presumably thinks: "Yes, I might as well". Soon enough he is staving in her skull, and von Trier fades from the results to a cubist portrait, whose artfully disarranged features correspond to the corpse’s. Thurman’s character is deliberately irritating, and her murder is supposed to come as a relief, while the second victim (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), also unnamed, is a gullible widow whose demise is played for laughs. His audience thus softened up, von Trier then goes for the jugular: it was around halfway through the Third Incident that the 100 or so walkouts from Monday night’s premiere began in earnest. 

At more than two and a half hours the film is wildly, fatuously overlong, and contains lots of the sub-Socratic bickering that padded out both parts of Nymphomaniac to much the same end. While Verge listens to Jack recount the story of his life, the two men digress into subjects as varied as architecture, engineering, the poet William Blake, the pianist Glenn Gould, and theatre of photography negatives, which Jack believes reveal the true, demonic quality of the light. 

Von Trier stakes out some meaty (and serious) philosophical turf with this stuff, but the connections to Jack’s story are superficial, while the autobiographical elements can be cringingly petty and self-serving, such as the ill-advised clip reel of von Trier’s own earlier films that plays when Jack thrills to the limitless power and potential of art. 

And while goading your audience into hoping that a female character gets murdered is provocation-by-numbers, it’s a vision of ambiguity next to Jack’s #MeToo-baiting speech, in which he complains “Why is it always the men’s fault? No matter where you go, it’s like you’re some kind of wandering guilty person… If one is so unfortunate to have been born male, you are always the victim, right?” 

As before with von Trier, everything simultaneously is and isn’t a joke, though the punchlines here often entail a kind of smirking grotesquerie that is all a bit Jake and Dinos Chapman circa 1997.

Exasperatingly there is much fine work here, particularly in the film’s most openly confessional passages where Jack discusses his childhood, and in which his words have the bleak, forbidden intimacy of a suicide note. There is also a lengthy epilogue titled Katabasis – the Greek term for “descent” – which features a series of expressionistic, infernal tableaux that comes close to salvaging the entire project.

Dillon is coldly magnetic and funny in what is a challenging role to say the least, while Riley Keough is heartbreakingly plausible as Jack’s sometime girlfriend Francesca, whom he cruelly nicknames Simple. She is the closest the film comes to having one of von Trier’s long-suffering Golden Heart heroines, like Breaking the Waves’ Bess McNeill, or Selma from Dancer in the Dark. In those days the shocks might have been less hellishly graphic, but their sting kept dancing on your skin. The House That Jack Built feels like way too much and nowhere near enough.