In a world where Hannibal aired for three seasons, Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built feels oddly inert, comparatively conventional and predictable as the lackluster titular protagonist recalls five allegedly random “incidents” to the mysterious Verge and the viewers claiming that murder can be art without playing The Police’s Murder by Numbers., which seems like a missed opportunity. Similar to Nymphomaniac, the protagonist bears their soul to a stranger who seems neutral in his ability to converse with someone that an ordinary person would soon back away from, but is actually in opposition.
The titular structure in The House That Jack Built could be metaphoric and/or literal, but is easily forgotten until the denouement though key to the plot. A house symbolizes the life that one builds through actions, and one sequence during the 4th incident contains a montage of clips from von Trier’s prior films, which makes the film autobiographical as the possible final film of his career. This sequence’s voiceover asserts that people do in art what they cannot do in real life. Which part of this film depicts what von Trier cannot do in real life? Is it the obvious answer, murder scores of people with impunity, or having long-lasting connections and relationships without people knowing you deeply until the end when you reveal everything to a stranger because the worst has already happened and have nothing left to lose?
von Trier suggested that Presidon’t inspired The House That Jack Built, but other than the protagonist being a shoddy builder who squanders his inheritance, a poor liar with bafflingly disproportionate successful results who clearly enjoys the sound of his own voice and shares the same disorders, I just don’t see it though red hats are prominent in one sequence. Matt Dillon plays the titular character brilliantly clearly alternating between playing his psyche and the ill-fitting mask of normalcy that he presents to others so they allow him to get close to them. von Trier’s best sequences are when he gives us a glimpse of Jack’s mental process in contrast to his reality. Jack is an unreliable narrator, and everything that von Trier shows us is through Jack’s negative photograph mind. We are not seeing what is happening, but the dark room of his mind even in reality.
Jack is not a serial killer in the ordinary sense of the word. His modus operandi is not stable as he escalates his murder style throughout the movie and the profile of his victims changes dramatically. He appears impulsive though as his acts become more premeditated, he aims to recreate genres of murders with inspirations from war and hunting techniques. The murders are literal cries for attention and help, but also act as effective therapy for mental disorders that used to plague him. Borrowing elements from American Psycho, the Iceman, and Jeffrey Dahmer meets the murder of Kitty Genovese, The House That Jack Built is less about a realistic profile of killer than a profile of a poseur, an imitator of people with more talent, incapable of originality. He thinks that his paltry murders rise him to the level of an icon, the worst men in history who commit the worst atrocities, but he falls short of any of his warped standards. He is an engineer with ambitions to become an architect. He can understand what makes things tick, but not how they live.
I immediately knew whom Verge was and what he and Jack were doing together before von Trier revealed it in the denouement, but I will not spoil it for you. Verge is Jack’s antithesis and has considerable credibility when he asserts that love is the divine material of a real artist. von Trier uses Jack as a stand-in for himself. He has evaluated his work and judges himself quite harshly. All his work has a John Irving loathing for men thus himself, but in The House That Jack Built, through his protagonist, he expresses his frustration at being lumped into this gender condemnation while committing the worst acts. He deserves the condemnation but cannot accept it so finds a way to deflect it and become the aggrieved party. If Jack is von Trier, Jack’s victims could be the actors that he tortured on set.
With a two hour thirty-minute run time, The House That Jack Built could have been shorter. Simply following murderous pretentious musings can grow tiresome. The best sequence is the 4th incident. Despite Jack’s derision of his next victim’s intelligence, she is the only victim that von Trier makes three-dimensional and easy to root for, which reflects that the protagonist’s claim that he cared about her is true. The others deliberately exist to be murdered without the viewer lingering over them and moving forward with the protagonist. von Trier is committed to depicting Jack’s reality. The point may not be to root for the victims, but the brief change in tone was refreshing, and Riley Keough succeeded at disrupting the monotony. Uma Thurman and Siobhan Fallon Hogan had thankless jobs, but are memorable in their service to von Trier’s series of victims. I encourage you to examine how the victims change as we begin to root for someone to finally stop Jack, which may be an intentional signal of viewers internalized misogyny at the violence that we seek to consume as entertainment versus what type of violence we consider disturbing. Even von Trier is reluctant to brutalize certain individuals in fiction.
von Trier’s pessimistic theology comes into play during the denouement as events become more surreal. Normally I get delighted when a director goes completely bananas and indulges in depicting the supernatural, but the last twenty-eight minutes, the epilogue, felt repetitive, oppressively literal and visually inadequate in comparison to Melancholia. It was an ill-fitting mixture of found footage elements and classic painting inspired scenes. It is a provocative concept, and I would love to hear a scene-by-scene analysis of each moment because the thought behind the work is superb and contradicts von Trier’s suspicions that he may be an imposter, but watching it left me cold. I theoretically appreciated the bookend nature of Jack’s journey—the various trails that lead to his freezer, the scythe. What happens when the anti-Christ finally goes home and realizes his ultimate dreams?
For all of von Trier’s self-condemnation and Jack’s obvious lack of talent, Jack still gets a disproportionately talented traveling companion. von Trier seems to be saying that actual talent or merit does not exclude one from making history in this life or the next. Validation lies in the company. Occupying history through notoriety is a type of victory though ultimately a soul killing one.
Even within his theology, von Trier is especially pessimistic in The House That Jack Built in contrast to Nymphomaniac. People value life more than things, and Jack only gets close to being caught when people suspect that he is a thief otherwise this film is devoid of any good Samaritan other than Jack, the bad Samaritan. The protagonist in Nymphomaniac believed that she is a sinner, but Jack feels zero guilt though he does get condemned, and there is divine intervention, justice.
If you enjoy serial killer movies, do not watch The House That Jack Built expecting traditional, satisfying fare. If you are a von Trier fan, he has done better work, and something in this film feels lacking.