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It’s also the first sign that we’re dealing with a bore — in both Jack, the serial killer Dillon’s playing, and von Trier. The rampant grisliness reportedly sent people at the Cannes Film Festival storming out the theater. But, at Cannes, that can be a badge of honor and also just Day 6. The version we’re seeing is merely R-rated now, and is said to run shorter and therefore luxuriate less in the nastiness. Instead, we’re meant to stare right through him and lock into a cathartic kinship with von Trier, whose impulse toward subversion is working through Jack.
Critics Reviews
The House That Jack Built received polarized reviews from critics, and criticism for its graphic violence. About 10 minutes before Matt Dillon whacks Uma Thurman across the face with a car jack in “The House That Jack Built,” I was thinking about the last time I really didn’t want to see a movie. And the winner was each of my afternoons spent with an installment of “The Human Centipede” torture trilogy. There’s something about knowing that you’re minutes away from watching a psycho surgically conjoin a stranger’s face to a different stranger’s rump that makes you want to be someplace else. Jack has killed women, mainly women, and in a gloatingly sadistic manner – he has dismembered them and kept their body parts as souvenirs. But the most purely evil thing he has ever done is shown in flashback when Jack, as a boy, amputates the foot of a sweet yellow duckling with a pair of pliers, and then places the poor animal back in the water to watch it wobble round and round.
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In fact, he’s constantly calling attention to his crimes, whether it’s the mechanic who saw him with his first victim or the guy he waves to on the porch of his second. Von Trier has claimed that there’s something of a Trump allegory at work in “Jack,” and it’s likely at least in part in how brazenly Jack commits his crimes. He’s almost begging to be caught, but no one seems to care enough to do so. The whack Dillon gives Thurman in the opening minutes is the first indication that we’re dealing with a loon.
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Jack kills the responding officer and returns to his freezer. He unseals a second chamber inside, where he meets Verge, who has been observing Jack throughout his life. Verge reminds Jack that he never built the home he intended to, as he had made several attempts to build his perfect house between his murders. In the freezer, he arranges the frozen corpses he has collected over the years into the shape of a house. As police break in, he enters his "house" and follows Verge into a hole in the floor, entering Hell.
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This moment really did look absolutely, horribly real. As ever, this is a pseudo-American Psycho, set in an America that looks heartsinkingly like the forests of Denmark or perhaps Germany, locations in which the appearance of American automobiles and American actors look almost surreally out of place. There is supposedly a place called “Carlson’s Supermarket” near one of these very remote chalets, and although we don’t see this store, we see its brown bag with its logo. I don’t think I have ever seen a more obviously faked artefact in a film in my life. By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes. By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies, and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands.
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Cinema’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier, is back with one of his most challenging and confrontational films in a career not exactly known for playing it safe. Notorious for a Cannes response that included both a standing ovation and hundreds of walk-outs, “The House That Jack Built” is finally available to American audiences, in limited release and on VOD in a slightly-edited R-rated cut. The “thrust” of von Trier’s vision remains to such a degree that it’s even hard to believe this version got an R (which raises the key question of “why bother cutting it at all?” but that’s for another piece). It’s one that compares artistry with murder as the director draws direct lines between creating art and taking lives.
Movie Info
Lars von Trier, the giggling charlatan-genius of world cinema, has returned in a kind of triumph to the Cannes playground of provocation from which he was temporarily exiled in 2011, having miscalculated a Nazi gag at a press conference, and proved unable or unwilling to walk it back. His latest tongue-in-cheek nightmare The House That Jack Built is two and a half hours long but seems much longer – longer than Bayreuth, more vainglorious than Bayreuth. It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared. But it concludes with what I also have to concede is a spectacular horror finale that detonated an almighty épat here in Cannes. The film ends with a colossal but semi-serious bang, an extravagant visual flourish and a cheeky musical outro over the closing credits to leave you laughing in spite of yourself as the house lights come up. But there is silliness and smirkiness where Von Trier believes the delicious black comedy to be.
So it’s a sort of relief that, for as sick and violent and sadistic as Lars von Trier’s new film is, “The House That Jack Built” fails to conjure anything as diabolical and morally outrageous as nonconsensual head-to-heinie. His movie is missing the clarity of vision to whip psychopathology into something rousingly intellectual. It fails to make depravity an experience that either stimulates or appalls. If I wanted to leave von Trier’s movie, it wasn’t because I was nauseated.
Production
Von Trier, to me, hasn’t made anything close to a masterpiece since “Breaking the Waves,” in 1996, and “The House That Jack Built” doesn’t spoil that record. It’s halfway between a subversive good movie and a stunt. But it would have gotten under your skin more if it offered a humane counterpart to Jack — if it didn’t remain so fixated on Matt Dillon’s disaffected zombie drone. Originally conceived as a television project by von Trier, The House That Jack Built began production in Sweden in 2016. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, marking von Trier's return to the festival after more than six years.
But what we’re really listening to is von Trier have a debate with himself. Does that make for entertaining or even thematically engaging cinema? Not always, and if anything frustrates me about “The House That Jack Built” it's that it feels less focused than his best recent work (“Melancholia,” “Nymphomaniac”). Some of the long conversations about art are naval-gazing garbage that would get someone kicked out of a college class. Ultimately, it’s more of an inconsistent cry into the void than the conversation starter it could have been. Most of all, like the serial killer who literally tells a cop about his crimes, von Trier just wants you to pay attention to him.
In the fourth incident, Jack is in a dysfunctional relationship with a woman, Jacqueline, whom he psychologically and verbally abuses and derisively nicknames "Simple." When he drunkenly confesses to her at her apartment that he has killed 60 people, she does not believe him. After he marks red circles around her breasts with a marker, she becomes frightened and approaches a policeman, but he dismisses her and Jack as drunk. Jack later binds her before cutting off her breasts with a knife. He pins one of the breasts to the policeman's car and fashions the other into a wallet. Jack, a failed architect from Washington State, recounts how he became a serial killer to Virgil—whom he refers to as Verge—as Verge leads Jack through the nine circles of Hell. Each of Jack's crimes, depicted through flashback, feature social commentary from Jack and Verge.
Repulsed or fascinated—he doesn’t really care as long as you see him. The movie loosely follows a five-act structure in which Jack takes us to his walk-in fridge (piled high with bodies and frozen pizzas) and talks us through some of his greatest kills. Thurman plays a ritzy dame whose car breaks down and asks Jack for help. Their drive to the mechanic occasions both a harangue and winking commentary. Does Jack know, she asks, that his vacant blood-red van makes him seem like a killer?
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