The House That Jack Built (2018) - Something's amiss in Von Trier's depraved, unpleasant serial killer pic

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Matt Dillon's titular culprit stares ominously past us through a plastic curtain on this poster for Lars Von Trier's The House That Jack Built

Jack carries on a conversation with a mysterious man named Verge about some perhaps pivotal, perhaps randomly elected murders he has committed during a 12 year period as a prolific serial killer.

The House That Jack Built is the 14th film, (depending on how you count them), from Danish master writer/director Lars Von Trier (The Idiots/Idioterne (1998)), with Jenle Hallund (Melancholia (2011), script consultant) contributing story elements.
In terms of music, digressions, structure, style, themes and tone, the film is classic Von Trier, who has stated that due to his failing health, it may be his last. It is packed with references and wry, pitch black humor, which, however, caused almost nil amusement on my part, simply because the macabre context kills the tasteless stabs at comedy here.
The film does not aim to enlighten with a psychological portrait of its titular serial killer; rather it opens up to an insight into him through a series of killings, which he talks about to Bruno Ganz (In Order of Disappearance/Kraftidioten (2014)), playing classical Greek literary figure Virgil. A recent, great serial killer film that does the opposite thing, namely probing a serial killer objectively through his formative years, prior to his murderous misdeeds, is Marc Meyers' My Friend Dahmer (2017), which I recommend for those who can stomach such intensely disturbing fare.
The House That Jack Built begins relatively light on the violence scale but later catches up with gruesome depravities that will make most stomachs turn, and which makes the film unfit for consumption for most average moviegoers. SPOILER The special effects are top notch, as we are used to from Von Trier's works, and particularly the offing of two kids and subsequent dealing with their corpses shocks and repels. SPOILER Jack is a nasty bugger, a compulsive, sadistic, narcissistic, arrogant misogynist-psychopath-megalomaniac, and it is not exactly a pleasure to get to know him. It is clear that Von Trier has created him with care and sympathetic insight, which only makes the film more questionable.
SPOILER Von Trier has ordered the film as a descent into hell for Jack, who thereby, as the advanced audiences will gather early on, may escape worldly punishment but gets his due eventually. SPOILER The idea seems to be that all the wrongs in the world, which Von Trier present through Jack, are redeemed through the fact that he eventually is dropped into the fiery depths of hell. - The last scenes which make up the hell section of the film are its best and somehow most tolerable part, I think, but still I cannot really condone the film, its logic or the general experience of it.
Matt Dillon (Tex (1982)), whose skeletal facial structure somehow seems tailor-made for Jack, is eerily authentic here, and the various ill-fated actresses are all good, although it is impossible to envy their jobs here. Unpleasant and possibly immoral, The House That Jack Built is cerebral, technically astute and not a Von Trier film I can immediately come out in favor of. In fact it may be a few years before I know for sure what to think about it.

Related posts: 

Lars Von Trier:  Nymphomaniac (2013) short version, vol. 1 & vol. 2, or, Lars Von Trier's Suck It  
Melancholia (2011) - Von Trier's heightened reality doomsday reflections 
Antichrist (2009) - Von Trier's cabin-in-the-woods psycho-horror 
The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part 1/De Unge År: Erik Nietzsche Sagaen Del 1 (2007) - Thuesen and Von Trier's hilarious film school comedy (autobiographical screenplay) 
2006 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Top 10: Best comedies reviewed by Film Excess to date
The Boss of It All/Direktøren for det Hele (2006) - Von Trier's hilarious absurd comedy 
Dear Wendy (2005) - Vinterberg and Von Trier's unpopular, gun-themed megaflop (writer)
Top 10: The best big flop movies reviewed by Film Excess to date 
Dogville (2003) - Von Trier's implacable, truly unique drama  
The Five Obstructions/De Fem Benspænd (2003, documentary) or, Lars von Trier vs. Jørgen Leth
Dancer in the Dark (2000) or, Selma the Immigrant    
Zentropa/Europa (1991) - Von Trier's audacious ode to the heavy continent is a fever dream on celluloid
Epidemic (1987) - Von Trier's trippy, bizarre second film  
The Element of Crime/Forbrydelsens Element (1984) - Von Trier's ultra-strange debut

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 9.9 mil. $
Box office: 0.5 mil. $ and counting
= Too early to say
[The House That Jack Built premiered 14 May (Cannes Film Festival, France, out of competition) and runs 155 minutes. The project was originally envisioned as a TV-series but later changed into movie format. Von Trier has described it as a celebration of life as "evil and soulless". Shooting took place in Sweden, Denmark, including Copenhagen, Italy and England from March - May 2017. The premiere in Cannes provoked walkouts from reportedly 100 audiences and critics, followed by a 6-minute applause, and the US release has also been crowned with controversy, as ratings authority MPAA has threatened distributor IFC Films with sanctions due to a screening of the unrated director's cut of the film without a waiver. The film has premiered to a predictably small reception in Von Trier's native Denmark, where 8k have bought admission so far. The film's current gross includes grosses from the US, France, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Its gross needs to explode inexplicably for it to avoid becoming a box office disaster, (which is normal for Von Trier's artistic, critically lauded works.) Von Trier has announced that he will return with a series of short films called Études. Dillon returned in Running for Grace (2018). The House That Jack Built is fresh at 63 % with a 6.4/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The House That Jack Built?

The Reader (2008) or, Guilt, Words and Love

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+ Best Adaptation of the Year

Simple, elegant poster for Stephen Daldry's The Reader

The Reader is an adaptation of a bestselling novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink (Self's Murder (2001)).
Michael is a German, who is remembering times decades ago, when he was a teenager in post-war Berlin 1958 and had an affair with an older woman, Hanna. An affair with an intimate, romantic connection and a physical one that was also centered on another activity; his reading novels aloud to her.
The affair profoundly changes Michael, as he learns later on that SPOILER Hanna was an SS camp officer in Auschwitz, the worst of the Nazi concentration camps.
The question of guilt is an issue in The Reader, as Michael is harrowed by an indistinct sense of guilt, and Hanna is prosecuted for the murder of 300 Jews that burned under her supervision in a church no less. Her sense of guilt is never explicit or very obvious, but it is there, especially developing out of Michael's gift to her, the gift of literacy. Michael is a very different, more sensitive individual, who has to process and find peace within himself for having a passionate affair with that woman in the course of the film. 
I found the ending, in which SPOILER he decides to drive his daughter to Hanna's grave and tell her of their relation, profoundly moving and really, really good. Sometimes wounds are simply healed by letting the truth come out.
The Reader decides against mainstream dramatic solutions, e.g. said ending, and the fact that none of Hanna's crimes are shown. It is a romantic period drama for thinking audiences, and acquaintance with some of the literary classics used by Michael in the film will only heighten the experience. Knowledge of the death camps and Holocaust is essential to understand the weight of Michael's burden in his life following Hanna's incarceration.

Kate Winslet and David Kross in Stephen Daldry's The Reader

Contrasting the intellectual side of The Reader, however, is its sensual scenes with young German actor David Kross (Tough Enough (2006)) and Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road (2008)). This whole part of the film is beautifully achieved; The Reader seems to allow itself a human curiosity about sexuality and bodies, very much like a sexual novel often does, (and perhaps like Schlink's does.) Besides, both performers are extremely well-acting; Winslet won her first Oscar for her work, and Kross is actually as good as her, as the young man.
In other parts in the fine cast, we see great actors Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin and Bruno Ganz.

David Kross, reading, and Kate Winslet, trying actively to understand what she is hearing, in Stephen Daldry's The Reader

The details:

Enjoyment of the film is heightened by general interest in its issues and Germany in the decades following WWII. The cast is comprised of Germans except for the few international stars already mentioned, and The Reader really 'nails' it in making its characters, though they speak English, seem very naturally German. Kross is naturally German, and Winslet, both in dress, physique, expressions and intonation, is so like a real, solid, German woman that she feels as though she could easily be Hanna Schmitz.
The film has a literary quality to it, beginning with a person's sickness and ending with that same person's confession many years later, and thus resounds its English writer David Hare and English director Stephen Daldry's previous masterpiece, The Hours (2002), which investigated English author Virginia Woolf and the impact of her novel Mrs. Dalloway in herself and other women in subsequent decades. The Reader is also a salute to the power of the written word and novels and has a complexity and depth to it that is intriguing and similar to what is often found in a good book.
The Hours is a very tough act to follow, and The Reader doesn't reach the searing, emotional heights and profundity of that film, but it remains a rock-solid narrative and a very fine film.
Daldry has since directed the interesting but (even) less good Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and is now in post with his latest, Trash (2014), a really interesting-sounding film set in a Third World country with Martin Sheen and Rooney Mara. - Can't wait to see that!

Related posts:

2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]  

2008 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2008 in films - according to Film Excess

Budget: 32 mil. $
Box office: 109.9 mil. $
= Big hit

What do you think of The Reader?