The House That Jack Built

Year of Release:  2018
Director:  Lars von Trier
Screenplay:  Lars von Trier, story by Jenle Hellund and Lars von Trier
Starring:  Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Grabol, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies
Running Time:  150 minutes
Genre:  Horror, thriller

Jack (Dillon) is an engineer, and aspiring architect who wants to build a house, he is also the brutal serial killer "Mr. Sophistication".  Telling his story to a mysterious interviewer (Ganz), Jack relates five of his murders, or "incidents" as he calls them, that took place over a period of twelve years.

This is kind of a violent horror art-film.  If you are familiar with the work of notorious danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, than you'll have an idea of what to expect with this.  It mixes scenes of shocking brutality, with images of striking beauty, odd digressions, archive footage and animation.  It's constructed in five chapters, and an epilogue.  Von Trier always seems to be trying to shock, provoke and frustrate his audience, and this will certainly do that.  I have seen many horror films, and even I found some of the violence hard to watch, which includes a graphic, but simulated, scene of animal torture, and documentary footage of historical atrocities.  However, it is also fascinating, striking and often darkly funny.  It is shocking, disturbing, offensive, funny, breathtaking, fascinating, dull and frustrating.  It kind of frustrates expectations at every turn, and the ending is frankly bizarre.  The performances are good, but this is really von Trier's show.

Riley Keough and Matt Dillon in The House That Jack Built         

Melancholia

Year:  2011
Director:  Lars von Trier
Screenplay:  Lars von Trier
Starring:  Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Keifer Sutherland, Stellan Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Udo Kier
Running Time:  135 minutes
Genre:  Drama, science-fiction, apocalyptic

It's the end of the world as we know it in the latest laugh filled romp from controversial Danish director Lars von Trier.  Justine (Dunst) and her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) turn up two hours late to their own wedding reception, held at the lavish country house owned by Justine's sister Claire (Gainsbourg) and her wealthy astronomer husband John (Sutherland).  At the reception, Justine, who suffers from manic depression, alienates her friends, family and her employer with her increasingly erratic behaviour.  In addition, a large rogue planet called Melancholia, which had been hidden behind the Sun is scheduled to pass by (or more likely to collide with) Earth in fve days time.

The film is told in two parts, the first, "Justine", deals with the disasterous wedding reception and plays like a savage dark comedy, while the second, "Claire", deals with the characters preparing for the approach of Melancholia and is an intense chamber drama.  It's fair to say, that while the film belongs squarely in the field of apocalyptic science-fiction and the main plot of an object about to collide with and destroy the Earth has been done many times before, this is very far removed from the action-adventure thrills of conventional science-fiction cinema.  This slow-moving, somber movie even pulls the rug out from the audience by denying us even the suspense of wondering whether or not the planet is going to collide with Earth.  It opens with a series of surreally beautiful slow-motion images depicting Earth's destruction by Melancholia (von Trier said that he did not want the audience in suspense for the wrong reasons)   

Lars von Trier is one of the most controversial directors working today and tends to strongly polarise his audience.  In the press conference for Melancholia at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival he managed to alienate almost everyone by saying that he admired Hitler and the Nazis.  However he later apologised and claimed that he didn't mean it and it was just a joke.  Aside from his idiotic comments at the press conference, it's harder to ignore the fact that in Lars von Trier films the women, his lead characters are usually women, tend to have misery upon misery heaped upon them until they achieve some kind of transcendence at the end.  However, he is a talented film-maker and this movie is probably the most stunning and visually impressive of his career.  There is more than a hint here of the influence of the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky who did his own apocalypse film with The Sacrifice (1986).

The acting, as usual with von Trier films, is spectacular with Kirsten Dunst giving a career best perfomance as the unhappy Justine, a character who is never particularly likeable but is never entirely unsympathetic and she gets good support from Charlotte Gainsbourg as the stressed, but level-headed, Claire.  Also the unrelenting misery is leavened by a streak of welcome dark humour.  

Fans of slow and depressing science-fiction drama won't want to miss it.

Kirsten Dunst is electric in Melancholia