The House That Jack Built review: Lars von Trier's provocative drama is almost ruined by a needless epilogue

Midway through The House That Jack Built (THTJB), Lars von Trier drops a short montage of shots from his previous films. To someone not fully acquainted with his work, it might appear like an introspective self-critique. A ridiculous anti-Semitic tirade delivered at the Cannes Film Festival a few years back and the resulting public outcry and banishment from the festival seems to be on his mind.

Trier opts to place the montage within a historical exegesis on art arguing that dictatorships are the most exaggerated forms of art created by the common person due to their passivity. But in doing so, he resolutely turns the crosshairs on the audience itself. He declares that people are at once the architects and the formative material for the ‘noble rot’ that forms the basis of great art. Just like a particular variety of grape has to begin rotting before it can be turned into the finest wine, humans themselves have to be at the receiving end of suffering for the grand artwork of the world to be created. It is a chimerical masterclass by the provocateur par excellence, which, unfortunately, is ruined by an unnecessary epilogue.

Trier is among the most argumentative of modern filmmakers. Lately, his work has been marked by an essayistic zeal; notably his last, Nymphomaniac, whose excellent first part even depicts a quasi-Socratic dialogue as the foundation of the film. For a majority of THTJB, Trier avoids the rhetorical missteps that part two of Nymphomaniac was tempted into. In Jack, brought to life by Matt Dillon’s ferocious performance, he puts us face to face with another protagonist whom we find ourselves rooting for against our will and better moral judgement, albeit occasionally. Trier’s serial killing psychopath is intelligent, polemical, witty, calculated and devoid of any moral fibre. He is at pains to provide a rationalist or metaphysical basis for his heinous acts — the five incidents that form the five chapters of Trier’s essay — and is as cruel to children as he is to men or women. Jack is as beyond good and evil as one can be.

Trier grounds Jack in a firmly historical basis through the character of Verge, played by Bruno Ganz, as a foil and witness for his acts. Verge is drawn after Virgil, Dante’s guide during his descent into Hell in his poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. The first few exchanges between the two suffice to prepare the literary inclined viewer for Jack’s impending fall. That Trier is cheekily putting a serial killer in the shoes of Italy’s greatest poet is another story altogether. Jack’s passage through the earthly purgatory, he explains to Verge, is marked by five acts of increasing cruelty and violence. These acts are underpinned by a feverishly comic tone, humour as black as the darkness slowly gathering around Jack, but one that he chooses to surround himself with at will. Often rendered all the more horrific yet funny by the lengthy dialogue that builds to the eventual act of violence, Trier proves himself a master at playing the audience before dropping the bomb on them. If the guffaws and nervous laughter the film’s screening inspired in the audience at MAMI are anything to go by, he succeeds in making us both witness and complicit in this act of purgation. Yes, Jack is building a house — quite literally — a Sisyphean task his ego won’t allow him to see through to fruition. But we will all be laying a brick or two of our own in there, more often than not unknowingly, and the blood will eventually be on our hands as well.

Therefore, THTJB can be construed as a venomous critique of the seemingly unfeeling, ego-driven madmen who’ve risen to the highest public offices around the world. The obvious target is contemporary America. The differing ethnicities of the victims, the assault on the institution of family, and Jack’s disdainful attitude towards women is indication enough. When Jack illustrates his need to continue killing by giving an example of a man walking underneath the streetlight — among the most dazzling sections of the film, Trier is smart enough to point us toward his more pressing need to escape culpability for his crimes. Jack invokes Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect of choice, while discussing plans for his house, one that he intends to be the acme of perfection, but one he cannot resist dismantling again and again. Juxtapose this with his disdain for Jacqueline, a woman he appears to fancy above all else, but eventually cannot avoid mutilating. He chastises her as simple for being unable to sense the danger he poses to her. It is a grim reminder of the fate that awaits those who sleepwalk into a nightmare marketed as a dream. Man’s fate of ending up as a trophy in the cabinet of an egotist’s invention provided we are not alert to the signs that portend the swell of an anti-democratic wave. THTJB is a grand construction, a house with many rooms underpinned by a ridiculously manic vision. But the hopes and dreams of its residents play second fiddle to the ego that derives its nourishment from the grandeur of the plans, eventually waylaid by its shoddy foundations.

Unfortunately, the occasional brilliance of Trier’s arguments and the dazzling cinematic framework he conjures to posit them is spoiled by the epilogue. It seems like a visually rich but obscenely sentimental reproach of a man who might escape punishment for his crime. The craft with which he assembles the parts that go into the heinous whole of the house — family? nation? — come apart under the weight of the unnecessary explication and visual grandeur that dovetail the film. Jack’s torment is at its peak when he suddenly realises that he missed the wood for the trees, a trenchant setback to his belief in his Ubermensch self. But the pit of hell that Trier proceeds to hurl him down rings hollow.

Ironically, THTJB leaves us with a sweet aftertaste, quite unbecoming for a Trier film. But it is the sweetness of aspartame, which might appear like the perfect response to Jack’s lionising of nature’s rules. But let’s not ascend into the realm of hope.

The House That Jack Built is angry, provocative, comical and deeply disturbing. But so, Trier appears to be saying, is anything when glimpsed through multiple perspectives. This is a film designed to start a conversation. On the whole, it achieves its purpose. Even a supremely dispensable epilogue cannot halt Jack’s progress through the purgatory of our minds.