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‘The House That Jack Built’: Lars von Trier’s

Serial-Killer Movie Is One Huge F–k You
The director's portrait of an artist as a psychopath reminds you that everything is permitted — except
failed acts of provocation
BY DAVID FEAR

DECEMBER 14, 2018

IT STARTS WITH a woman being bashed in the face with a tire-jack (get it?!) and ends, literally, in hell.
In between those two particular poles of depravity, Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built “treats”
viewers to a litany of violent images: stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings, bludgeonings,
post-mortem taxidermy, amputated human appendages repurposed as wallets. (Please don’t ask,
“Which appendage?” You do not want to know.) The fact that the version hitting theaters now has been
toned down — we’re deploying this phrase as loosely as the Danish director’s attitudes regarding
narrative momentum, or emotional engagement, or affection for his fellow carbon-based life forms —
from the unrated cut that caused such Cannes-troversy this past spring is a blessing of sorts.

But as you follow a serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon, extraordinarily committed to being a creep)
throughout his homicidal endeavors, a viewer might wonder if merely trimming five minutes of graphic
material was enough. Perhaps they could have removed another banality-of-evil hour or so from this
two-and-a-half-hour slog. Or simply cut to the chase and run the Bosch-lite coda right after the opening
credits. You wouldn’t be missing much. Just the cinematic equivalent of a long, endless smirk.

Framed as a series of “incidents” that are buffered by voiceover conversations between Jack and Verge
(Bruno Ganz), a.k.a. Virgil the tour guide of The Divine Comedy, von Trier’s mash-up of cerebral
exchanges and American carnage shares a lot with its protagonist. It’s highly intelligent, more than a
touch sociopathic and narcissistic to a fault. It’s prone to long-winded rants and fits of rage, when it can
be bothered to feel anything at all. It’s handsome when seen from certain angles, a fact that it uses to
draw unsuspecting folks into its toxic orbit until, boom, sorry, too late for you. It’s sloppy at times,
purposefully so, as if it’s trying to be caught. And it has a tendency to compare — some might also favor
the word “mistake” — murder for art, or maybe art for murder.
That last bit is what truly gets von Trier going: a portrait of an artist as a psychopath. Or rather, a
self-portrait, since Jack is in many ways a stand-in for the man clacking the laptop keyboard and
standing behind the camera. This killer has a tendency to compose his corpses, some fresh and others
frozen, for pictures that he can pore over later; occasionally, he has to do reshoots. He’ll issue directions
to his “players,” ranging from “sit over here” to “feed this dead boy some pie.” At one point, he ties
numerous abductees up in a very specific manner so he can shoot them (like, actually shoot them, but
still) and has to keep moving his rifle further back to get the frame in focus. (Gosh, don’t his crosshairs
look just like a camera viewfinder!) Should we not get the gist, the filmmaker has Dillon’s character
rhapsodizing about the agonies and ecstasies of killing over a montage of von Trier’s own work. There
are two sadists here. One of them happens to be onscreen.

But somewhere between watching Uma Thurman get battered by an obsessive-compulsive,

beta-version of Jack and suffering through an alpha version of him mouth M.R.A. platitudes to Riley
Keough — to be fair, the film’s misogyny is simply the string section in an orchestra of misanthropy —
you begin to wonder what von Trier is up to, exactly. Is he trying to point his finger at a complicit
audience, a la Michael Haneke’s Funny Games? Is he using the horrific extremes of human behavior to
point out the dehumanizing structures of society, in the key of Salò? Is he taking the piss out of our love
of thrill-kill cult movies and pop entertainment, i.e. The Silence of the Lambs or TV’s Hannibal? (The
latter’s baroque death art initially seems a like a target when the director gives us a God’s-eye shot
featuring lines of dead crows … then he virtually lifts a scene from the TV show for the third act.)

The answer, so far as we can tell, is “Maybe all of them or none of them,” or possibly “Well, [shrugs] if
you say so,” or probably “Go fuck yourself, audience, tee hee.” Von Trier has given us a banquet of food
for thought here, but in his eyes, it’s simply all the better for us to gag on. There is no such thing as good
or bad art. (Bad taste, sure, but that’s something else.) There is definitely ugly art, however, and in the
right hands, there can be so much insight to be mined by rubbing one’s face in the worst of it. That’s
assuredly not the case here. Unlike von Trier’s best works — Breaking the Waves, Dogville, Melancholia,
all works we’d take a full-metal-jacket bullet from Jack for — anything being said here is being drowned
out by the actors’ screams and the creator’s sniggering. Those films prove he’s a great artist. Jack
proves he’s also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell
seems superfluous. We’ve already been there for two and a half hours.
 Chicago’s alternative nonprofit newsroom

The House That Jack Built is Lars von Trier’s

way of showing how much he loves women
He just has a funny way of showing it.
by Anne Elizabeth Moore
January 18, 2019

The centerpiece—soul, even—of every Lars von Trier film is a scene of compelling destruction. Breaking
the Waves (1996), a fictional tale, has Emily Watson on a stretcher believing that the love of her life
needed her raped and beaten in order to survive himself. In the 2003 documentary The Five
Obstructions, von Trier’s real-life mentor Jørgen Leth is served an elaborate meal in the red-light district
of Mumbai. The local poverty serves to highlight Leth’s wealth and privilege, of course, but we watch
something more complex erode in the relationship between the two Danish filmmakers—respect, maybe,
or admiration, and the combination is gutting and awful. Melancholia (2011) famously depicts the end of
everything, full stop, and the film both begins and ends with the most aesthetically pleasing images of
our own demise yet viewed onscreen. That the sites of destruction are often women’s bodies has led to
frequent accusations of misogyny on the part of the filmmaker.

The House That Jack Built is the story of a man who finds relief from anxiety by killing a series of
people—women, mostly—in increasingly bizarre ways. As his means of killing become more elaborate,
his confidence grows, and soon he is straightforwardly telling both intended victims and police officers
that he is a murderer. The scene of elaborate destruction we build to is entirely predictable if you know
anything whatsoever about the architect-turned-serial-killer narrative or the filmmaker. Because it is the
centerpiece of the film, its soul, it satisfies when it emerges, but we glimpse it only for a second, as if von
Trier himself were bored by the only moment of ingenuity he’s conjured in nearly a decade.

Of course, viewers have by then slogged through two hours narrated by one of the least ingenious serial
killers to ever enter the public imagination. The genre is riddled with men—usually—and their theories
about humanity, as well as their plans for its manipulation, control, or extermination. (Films about female
serial killers do exist, but we generally call them “rape revenge fantasies” and dismiss the genre as
“emotionally driven” and thus unworthy of inclusion in the “real” serial killer genre.) Von Trier’s titular
character Jack, played by Matt Dillon, is no different. He believes he is better than everyone else
because he is an artist, beyond morality, gifted with the ability to elicit aesthetic pleasure and thus
improve all of humanity. He is a narcissist, like every other serial killer.

The film follows a standard Divine Comedy plotline: a man confesses his crimes as punishment for them
in the afterlife is about to commence. Jack’s Vergil is Verge (Bruno Ganz), and, as in Dante’s original, he
is a moral being who condemns Jack for crimes against women as a class and humans as a race. In
fact, the film switches genres somewhere amid Jack’s self-congratulatory reminiscences of the four
distinct murders that organize the tale, and we lapse into a filmic essay. Von Trier lobs moments from his
own work—the Melancholia and Breaking the Waves scenes mentioned above are included—into the
string of images of great works of architecture and painting and archival footage of Glenn Gould playing
the piano that Jack’s narration alludes to. The montage also includes “great” works of, uh, genocide
because, you know, serial killers love that shit, but more importantly because von Trier wants us to read
Jack as the enfant terrible filmmaker himself, known to create great scenes of compelling destruction.
The House That Jack Built is von Trier’s response to his critics.

Yet von Trier is no remorseless killer. In fact, the tired Infernoesque structure is the filmmaker’s way of
acknowledging universal order: there is a right and a wrong, he wants us to understand, and certain
acts—acts that he himself has depicted on film and therefore has perpetrated in real life in order to film,
and which his critics have called into question—are profoundly, eternally wrong. Jack flaunts his crimes
to passersby, to victims, to on-duty officers of the peace, yet they continue. Von Trier has suggested that
this is a nod to Trumpism, but it more basically functions as a restoration of order. Von Trier is
comfortable crossing boundaries when boundaries are clearly marked. In American culture right now,
however, the boundaries between right and wrong have become quite blurry. Von Trier feels the need to
remind us of the centuries-old distinction between right and wrong so we can properly condemn him for
crossing those lines. Look at this horrible man! He hated women before the president did!

Aesthetic sins, too, unfold: ham-fisted flashbacks, often of events that occurred onscreen mere moments
before they are relayed to Verge, are the most grievous. There’s a weird recurring bit cribbed from the
video for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” that awkwardly seeks to ally Jack with, I dunno,
super famous people or something. (Von Trier’s grasp of the U.S., where he has never been, has always
been shaky.) The archival footage is frequently replayed, too, so that by the end of the film we are left
with the impression that we have just watched a fairly standard B-grade horror movie remixed by a
first-year art-school student who feels he has something to say. And that we have watched it twice in a
row. Because that’s the way it was intended to be screened.

An actor of limited range, Dillon capably depicts the self-aware psychopath. In fact, he underplays the
emotionless Jack so thoroughly that his greatest line is an affirmative “OK,” delivered to his
girlfriend/victim Jacqueline, both cast in the flat, uninspired tones of the 1970s color palette the film is
staged in. He calls her Simple as part of his torture regime—it’s also von Trier’s self-aware nod to critics
accusing him of misogyny. Von Trier doesn’t like simplicity. When an early draft of Antichrist was
completed, the filmmaker wasn’t satisfied with the volume of hate it directed at women, so he sought out
an expert on the subject to push the misogynistic aspects further. Of course the real experts on misogyny
are all women, so von Trier found misogyny expert Heidi Laura and paid her to offer advice on more
effective means of depicting the deeply seated despisement of women in his film. Would a misogynist do
that? (It’s a serious question.)

Simple is, therefore, a smoke screen. Walk through it and you’re left with Jack, who has already killed
someone with a tire jack (get it?), and now he’s emotionally moved by and ultimately kills someone he
calls Simple but who is really named Jacqueline, the feminine version of himself. “If one is so unfortunate
as to have been born male, then you’re also born guilty. Think of the injustice in that!,” Jack even tells
Jacqueline. It’s both the big reveal that the women von Trier abuses in his films are all versions of himself
and an invitation to imagine what sort of film we might have been left with had she been granted
protagonist status in a “real” serial killer film, The House That Jacqueline Built.

But von Trier didn’t make that film. Instead he tossed off this puerile attempt to silence his critics, using
without examination every tired trope from the male serial killer movie genre there is, and then layering
another trite trip-to-hell story line over it. The filmmaker’s work was interesting—fascinating, occasionally
repellent, but often excellent—when misogyny and misanthropy were driving forces. Here, examined,
we’re given instead raw narcissism, humdrum in the end, a soul worth glimpsing only for a second before
casting aside. Nothing to behold.
A Casa que Jack construiu | Crítica: o inferno é social
por Raquel Rapini em 28 de janeiro de 2019

Considerações sobre o filme de serial killer do

Lars Von Trier.
A Casa que Jack Construiu (The house that Jack built) é novo thriller alegórico de Lars Von Trier, que
retrata os casos de assassinatos ao longo de doze anos cometidos pelo serial killer Jack – em atuação
impecável de Matt Dillon.

O longa polêmico de Von Trier não deseja apenas chocar, nem entrega um filme débil e gore, carregado
em cenas de violência gratuita e sem sentido. Baseado na Divina Comédia, diálogos inteligentes entre
Jack e seu próprio Virgilio divagam sobre a arte, valores morais, violência social e Nazismo.

Autointitulado como Sr. Sofisticação, o serial killer escolhe 5 atos para narrar, sob seu ponto de vista
apático e egocêntrico, alguns dos assassinatos que cometeu.

As manias absurdas de Jack causadas pelo TOC atrapalham seus assassinatos a sangue frio e são a
base de uma comédia negra e debochada.

Seus atos recebem contrapontos de Virgilio, que age como antagonista e questiona não apenas a
conduta do assassino, mas traz um ponto de vista satírico de Von Trier sobre seus próprios filmes e
temas controversos do qual fez parte nos últimos anos.

Durante o filme, Jack busca defender a brutalidade, o horror e o assassinato como forma de arte. Arte
também vista como expressão política. A qual ele persegue durante toda sua vida como engenheiro
frustrado, impedido de ser arquiteto pela mãe.

A figura materna é alvo de seu ódio internalizado – comumente visto em muitos psicopatas inspirados
na realidade – que Jack canaliza para outras mulheres vulneráveis e ingênuas, opostas à personalidade
de sua mãe.

O que incomoda mesmo é a misoginia e o feminicídio nos atos escolhidos. Entretanto, não se trata de
uma mensagem que legitima a violência contra a mulher.

A mulher vista como objeto de subjugação, humilhação e como presa, assim como o abuso físico e
psicológico, são assuntos tratados como dignos de psicopatia.

A negação do serial killer sobre o ser feminino é evidente quando corta os seios de uma moça ingênua
– os mesmos que nutrem a vida, e são mais tarde objeto de desejo. A desumanização do sexo feminino
em busca de reparação pela subjugação de uma figura materna opressiva.

O ódio ao feminino é fio condutor do ciclo de destruição e reconstrução que Jack está preso.
Direcionado também na eterna construção e demolição da casa tão almejada por ele. Mas o material
nunca é perfeito.
Sua obsessão pelo perfeccionismo é retratada pelas inúmeras cenas reais de Glenn Gould, pianista
considerado ícone da perfeição artística, interpretando uma peça de Bach.

Ao contrário do que se espera de um personagem decadente, Jack acentua a decadência social em

contraste com seus assassinatos.

Chocante é estar de frente com as inversões de valores crescentes no mundo real.

Ele exemplifica seu ponto de vista propondo uma brincadeira perversa a uma das vítimas:

Ela pode gritar por ajuda na janela do prédio. Ninguém dá a mínima. Também pode correr até a viatura
parada na calçada e pedir ajuda ao policial, que apenas diz que ela está bêbada e a aconselha voltar ao
prédio.

Minutos depois do assassinato, Jack sai pela porta da frente, e vê o mesmo policial enquadrar um casal
de jovens negros que apenas estava passando pelo local.

Dias depois ele confecciona uma carteira com os seios da vítima e usa normalmente em situações
cotidianas. Novamente ninguém repara.

Angustiante é reconhecer tais nuances na realidade.

O terror reside no retrato de como os humanos facilmente tendem a abusar da inocência, ingenuidade e
vulnerabilidade de outros seres vivos, principalmente quando se trata de seus semelhantes.

As caças como prática esportiva em temporadas designadas a exterminar determinadas raças de

animais são nada sutis ao serem comparadas com limpezas étnicas pregadas pelo III Reich, Ku Klux
Klan e supremacistas brancos.

O Nazismo é ponto especialmente atacado por Von Trier. Um serial killer megalomaníaco, frustrado
como artista, tal como Hitler. A barbárie como expressão artística, mencionado também através de
Albert Speer, arquiteto-chefe e ministro do Armamento do Terceiro Reich. Conhecido como “O bom
nazista”.

Jack caminha pelo plano do mundo real observando comportamentos humanos, como Virgilio conduz
Dante pelos três reinos dos mortos, começando pelo inferno.

O inferno deixa de ser a ideia do que se encontra após a morte, ou digno de castigo divino. Ele é social,
palpável, humano e real. Nas palavras de August Strindberg: o inferno é aqui.

Este sofrimento cru, real além das cenas bem construídas artisticamente por Von Trier, é uma estratégia
de denúncia, não de prazer sádico. Neste ponto de vista niilista, não há outra comparação senão a com
o inferno.

Von Trier equilibrou bem as doses de reflexão, sátira, crítica e violência para tratar de uma realidade
social que o cinema de puro entretenimento não ousa, e apenas oferece mais um refúgio do que nossos
olhos se recusam a ver.

Não é nenhuma surpresa que The House That Jack Built pode (e deve) incomodar: é um abrir de olhos
necessário. Especialmente em tempos de ascensão do neofascismo pelo mundo.
Crítica: 'A casa que Jack construiu'

Bonequinho aplaude sentado: 'Tudo é

sustentado por muita provocação'
Mario Abbade
15/11/2018 - 03:21

Para ser relevante, a arte deveria causar desconforto? Tendo em vista essa questão, o provocador Lars
von Trier leva o público a uma jornada sombria pela mente de um psicopata. Jack (Matt Dillon, em
excelente atuação) conta, em episódios, assassinatos violentos que cometeu da forma como os vê,
como uma espécie de arte. Seu ouvinte é Virgílio (Bruno Ganz), numa citação da obra “A divina
comédia”, de Dante Alighieri, em que ele guia o autor pelo inferno.

Seguindo uma estrutura parecida com a de “Ninfomaníaca”, seu filme anterior, Von Trier tem como
argamassa as conversas entre Jack e Virgílio, em que história, sociedade, música e arquitetura, entre
outros assuntos, são debatidos com o objetivo de levantar questões sobre o comportamento humano.
Junto, surgem sequências de embrulhar o estômago pelo excesso de violência. E escolhas pouco
convencionais vêm a propósito de questionar o papel da arte. Não por acaso, ele usa também imagens
de outros filmes seus, num exercício ao mesmo tempo de narcisismo e de expressão criativa nem
sempre compreendida.

Em certos momentos, cenas podem alimentar quem quiser ver misoginia, mas o desprezo pelas
mulheres é desautorizado pelo modo como o filme aborda as ações e os julgamentos do psicopata.
Como quando ele ensaia se fazer de vítima, enquanto é mostrado praticando um ato brutal contra a
verdadeira vítima. Lars usa essencialmente a linguagem cinematográfica para estabelecer essa
desconstrução: a imagem contradiz, com evidência, o discurso.

Outro ponto para entender a perspectiva do diretor nas cenas mais extremas é a maneira como ele as
trata com uma dose de humor negro. O cineasta já reiterou em entrevistas que, na Escandinávia (ele
nasceu na Dinamarca), esse jeito de fazer comédia é mais bem compreendido. O que gera desconforto
é a forma como ele faz o espectador rir em situações desagradáveis — para isso, segue um dos
mandamentos do cinema, segundo Hitchcock: manipular o público.

Tudo é sustentado por muita provocação. Como diria o produtor Luiz Carlos Barreto, “os provocadores
têm sempre muita importância em todos os processos”. Von Trier parece ter isso como ponto de partida,
sempre pronto a instigar, desafiando a algo maior do apenas concordar ou discordar. É possível ver seu
trabalho de duas formas. Como a colunista Hedda Hopper fez por décadas em Hollywood, destruindo
diretores com base em seu gosto pessoal. Ou como o ensaísta André Bazin pregava: sendo um
mediador entre a obra e a plateia, buscando o que não está imediatamente visível. Ambas são
legítimas, mas, ao final, o veredicto fica a critério do espectador.