The House That Jack Built (2018)

Lars von Trier returns to Cannes, banned no longer, with a film about a serial killer who fancies himself an architect. Matt Dillon plays Jack, who narrates his twelve years of murder to a patient figure named Verge, and the structure is Dante by way of a lecture hall. Bodies accumulate in a walk-in freezer. A duckling loses a leg. Uma Thurman loses an argument and then her life. The film offers all of this with the solemnity of a museum retrospective, and the audience at the premiere reportedly fled in droves before returning to applaud for ten minutes, which tells you most of what you need to know about the reception.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is white and European, drawn from the director's standing repertory. Women exist to be tormented and then repurposed, one breast becoming a wallet, another pinned to a police car, which is the opposite of any feminist reading. Race goes unmentioned. The climate goes unmentioned. Capital goes unmentioned, though Jack does own a factory and a failing architectural practice, and the film has no interest in either as economics. Bodies are meat and trophies, so body positivity is absent. There is a genuine thread of obsessive-compulsive disorder running through the second chapter, where Jack's compulsion to clean a crime scene nearly gets him caught, but the film treats the condition as a symptom of his homicidal machinery, not as a portrait of a neurodivergent life.

The monologues are where the film reaches for gravity. Jack holds forth on art, engineering, murder, and the general rottenness of humanity, and Verge listens with the weariness of a man who has heard it all before. This is lecture energy of a kind, though it lectures toward misanthropy instead of virtue, which is its own sort of tedium. The film is fictional, borrowing from Dante and the Kola Superdeep Borehole, and revises no historical record. What remains is a provocation that punishes its protagonist in the final reel and calls it morality. The credits roll to Hit the Road Jack. Nobody learns anything, least of all the audience.