What on earth is Lars Von Trier up to? Or maybe what the hell, given the setting of The House That Jack Built? His 2018 film, controversial from the get-go and barely given a theatrical release in the U.S., is out on Blu-ray with the theatrical and director’s cut. The release on the Scream Factory label indicates that Trier’s handlers could think of nothing to do but market it in America as a horror movie.
Jack (Matt Dillon) is a serial killer, making his way down the circles of hell, recounting his murders through flashbacks with Virgil (Bruno Ganz) at his side. What better guide, given the ancient Roman poet’s role in Dante’s tour of purgatory and hell, The Divine Comedy? For much of the film Jack is cold-eyed and emotionless; a sociopath devoid of empathy, he must practice smiling in the mirror to better blend in with humanity.
Virgil is a voice unseen until the final scenes. He sounds (and looks) more like a Weimar intellectual, a rabbinical refugee, than a Roman poet as he hears what amounts to Jack’s confession. “I don’t believe you’re going to tell me anything I haven’t heard before,” Virgil says with an audible shrug. Along the way he occasionally punctures Jack’s pretensions and deliver sound psychological analysis. “Is there an element of come catch me?” Virgil asks. Like many serial killers, Jack grows bolder, more careless, as the body count climbs.
Jack is an architect who fancies himself as an intellectual and an artist—cut from the smashed face of his first victim to a Cubist portrait, from playing god with lives to an art history digression on Gothic cathedrals. The great dictators of the last century were “extravagant art,” in Jack’s words—cut to Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia. Not unlike Hitler, Jack has qualms about hunting—but not homicide.
Virgil, understandably and without surprise (he probably led Hitler across the Styx), calls Jack “thoroughly depraved.” He adds, “Without love, there is no art,” an idea Jack and many postmodern people (murderers or not) might find old fashioned. The poet has a bit of mordant fun with Jack’s more commonplace disorders. He’s obsessive compulsive; a perfectionist who keeps tearing down his own house because it doesn’t match his vision; an admirer of the hermetically-sealed pianist Glen Gould (“He represents art?” Virgil mocks); a neat freak who straightens the pictures on the walls of his victims.
The murder scenes are excruciating and beg the question: when does the exploration of a sick mind become a sickness? The House That Jack Built lunges from profundity to bad comedy before becoming in some scenes as suspenseful as Hitchcock. I don’t want to watch it again but I keep thinking about it. The horror of it is that there are many Jacks among us, even if most of them never kill.
