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Can a movie be both repulsive and captivating? Cinema’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier, is back with one of his most challenging and confrontational films in a career not exactly known for playing it safe. Notorious for a Cannes response that included both a standing ovation and hundreds of walk-outs, “The House That Jack Built” is finally available to American audiences, in limited release and on VOD in a slightly-edited R-rated cut. Don’t worry. The “thrust” of von Trier’s vision remains to such a degree that it’s even hard to believe this version got an R (which raises the key question of “why bother cutting it at all?” but that’s for another piece). So what is that vision? It’s one that compares artistry with murder as the director draws direct lines between creating art and taking lives. The film finds von Trier wrestling with the claims of misogyny and misanthropy that have followed him his entire career, but not in the way you’d expect. If anything, he leans into both, daring you to look into the abyss with him as he interrogates his own dark side and banishes himself to the underworld. 

Jack ( Matt Dillon ) is a prodigious serial killer. He has killed dozens of people and he’s on his way to literal Hell, accompanied by a man who calls himself Verge ( Bruno Ganz ), modeled after Dante’s Virgil. As they travel through the circles of Hell, Jack describes five of his most brutal crimes, and we witness the evolution of a madman. His first “incident” took place when he picked up a woman ( Uma Thurman ) on the side of the road after she got a flat tire. The woman, never named, berates Jack constantly, wondering aloud if he’s a serial killer but basically calling him too weak to be one. After he's had enough, she gets a tire jack to the face. Get it?!?! A jack from Jack! Your tolerance for that kind of dark meta-humor will dictate a lot of your response to “The House That Jack Built.”

Jack’s crimes get more insanely violent and reprehensible, and nothing is off limits for von Trier. Jack murders a woman in her living room, guns down a family on a hunting trip, and in the film’s most misguided sequence, cuts off the breasts of a woman he has verbally berated and nicknamed “Simple” ( Riley Keough ). He tells her he’s going to do it. In fact, he’s constantly calling attention to his crimes, whether it’s the mechanic who saw him with his first victim or the guy he waves to on the porch of his second. Von Trier has claimed that there’s something of a Trump allegory at work in “ Jack ,” and it’s likely at least in part in how brazenly Jack commits his crimes. He’s almost begging to be caught, but no one seems to care enough to do so.

But, of course, despite pleas to see it as a Trumpian allegory, Jack is more of a stand-in for von Trier himself. He not only envisions his elaborate murders as works of art but arranges the bodies afterwards into an increasingly morbid tableau. He keeps the corpses in a giant walk-in freezer, and delights in moving them around like, well, a director moves actors on a screen. And Jack is something of an obsessive-compulsive, another trait he likely shares with a man who made a movie like “ The Five Obstructions ” (in which a director had to follow specific rules like, well, a serial killer who needs his crimes to be executed to perfection). And von Trier has been accused of misogyny on-screen and off, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Jack’s victims are mostly naïve women, although it's sometimes hard to watch.

What does all of this add up to? The film’s final stunning 20 minutes feature some of the most striking imagery of von Trier’s career, but you have to get through the torture of “Simple” and the shooting of children to get there. Is von Trier castigating audiences a la Michael Haneke ? Or is he almost parodying himself just to get a rise out of people? There’s a fine line between art and provocation, and the best parts of “The House That Jack Built” seem to be interrogating that line. Is this art? Is this vile? Can it be both?

So, is “The House That Jack Built” hollow provocation or dense commentary? I’m honestly not sure yet. It’s undeniably too long (153 minutes), often meandering through the same points over and over again in a way that becomes numbing, but there’s something more complex here than I think its critics are willing to see. Don’t get me wrong, I understand not being willing to dig through the horrors of this movie, and/or presuming there’s nothing to unearth, especially given von Trier’s track record of playful misanthropy. But von Trier remains a fascinating conundrum to me—a director who sees violence and pain on the same artistic spectrum as love and joy. Some might look at “The House That Jack Built” and say it’s completely lacking in the empathy we so often want from our artists, but I think von Trier would disagree, arguing that empathy requires understanding the entire human condition and not just its good side.

Does that make for entertaining or even thematically engaging cinema? Not always, and if anything frustrates me about “The House That Jack Built” it's that it feels less focused than his best recent work (“ Melancholia ,” “Nymphomaniac”). Some of the long conversations about art are naval-gazing garbage that would get someone kicked out of a college class. Ultimately, it’s more of an inconsistent cry into the void than the conversation starter it could have been. Most of all, like the serial killer who literally tells a cop about his crimes, von Trier just wants you to pay attention to him. Repulsed or fascinated—he doesn’t really care as long as you see him. It's up to you to decide if he's worth seeing. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

The House That Jack Built (2018)

153 minutes

Matt Dillon as Jack

Bruno Ganz as Verge

Uma Thurman as Lady 1

Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Lady 2

Sofie Gråbøl as Lady 3

Riley Keough as Simple

Jeremy Davies as Al

• Lars von Trier

Writer (story by)

• Jenle Hallund

Cinematographer

• Manuel Alberto Claro
• Jacob Secher Schulsinger
• Molly Malene Stensgaard

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Film Review: ‘The House That Jack Built’

Matt Dillon is spooky and possessed in Lars von Trier's serial-killer drama, a movie that keeps you grimly absorbed and shut out at the same time.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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There’s a transcendently creepy image in “ The House That Jack Built ,” Lars von Trier ’s two-and-a-half-hour drama starring Matt Dillon as a serial killer in the late ’70s. The movie is divided into five “incidents” — the word used by Jack (Dillon), a loner and failed architect in the Pacific Northwest, to describe the gruesome banquet of homicide he orchestrates and improvises, each act of hideous violence made different from the last (though he thinks of all of them as works of art). In one of these atrocities, he has been out for an afternoon hunting with his “family” — a woman (Sofie Gråbøl) he’s seeing and her two young sons — and, in a shocking moment, he stands in a rifle tower and guns down both boys. The second murder is a shot to the head that, in its suck-in-your-breath way, evokes the JFK assassination.

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OK, that’s horrible. But the truly creepy moment arrives after that. Jack takes the corpses to the walk-in freezer where he stores the bodies of all his victims. He waits until rigor mortis is setting in and then, using tools, he sets one of the boy’s faces so that it looks…just so. We get a glimpse of it: The face is now fixed with a hideous bloody grin, so that the boy resembles a dead tween version of the Joker. That’s a memorable image of the evil men are capable of.

“The House That Jack Built,” however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive. And that’s not just because a lot of it doesn’t track along the spectrum of reality-based storytelling. (This is a movie that features, in scene after scene, the world’s dumbest cops.) Shot in the stripped-down, naturalistic hand-held manner that gives von Trier’s films their immediacy, but also leaves you with the feeling that he’s making up scenes as he goes along, “The House That Jack Built” presents a murder junkie of cold-eyed lunacy and raging indifference whom the movie doesn’t necessarily want you to understand.

There’s an integrity to that, since serial killers are weirdly wired animals. It’s folly, on some level, to try and “explain” them. In “The House That Jack Built,” Dillon gives a spooky and possessed performance, one that reaches to the outer limits of a compulsive murderer’s flat affect and lunar oddity. At first he’s a volatile nerd, in buttoned-up shirts and aviator frames ( very Dahmer) and plastered-down hair, who talks and talks his way into a victim’s house. (He’s so nutjob obsessive that if you listen long enough, the crazy patter starts to turn manipulative.) His Jack puts on an imitation of emotions and then wears them like a badly fitting set of clothes. He also strangles, stabs, mutilates, and fires bullets in full-metal-jacket casings. He has no feeling for others, and that’s what haunts us: Looking at Jack, we don’t feel a thing — or, rather, we feel an absence of empathy that mirrors his own.

But that’s also a problem for the film. Jack is by turns cunning and sloppy, arrogant and opaque. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which compels him to return to one victim’s house three times to clean up the tell-tale blood he only imagines is there. He also likes to tempt fate, taking chances that are completely…well, insane. Through it all, though, he remains a man who’s lifeless on the inside. And “The House That Jack Built” is too. It’s not just a prestige sadomasochistic exploitation film, like von Trier’s “Antichrist” or parts of “Nymphomaniac: Vols. I and II.” But it’s a drama that leaves you shaken yet detached, chilled and a little numb. Almost every scene in it has been overly designed to grab your attention.

Von Trier, for a while now, has winked at the way that he himself projects the spirit of a killer. The characters in his films — Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves,” Björk in “Dancer in the Dark,” just about everyone in “Dogville” — have often ended up dying in what feels like the director’s ritualized acts of execution. And the comments that got von Trier banned from Cannes seven years ago, when he confessed in a press conference to having maybe just a tiny little soft spot for Hitler (“I think he did some wrong things…but yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit”), fed into the von Trier cult of the-killer-inside-me. That moment was the culmination of his transition from artist to punk provocateur who wore the snarky perversity of his aggression like an armband.

When von Trier walked into the theater of the Palais just before the world premiere of “The House That Jack Built,” the audience greeted him with a standing ovation that lasted for five minutes. The warm welcome seemed to be a way of saying: All is forgiven. We still love you. And now more than ever, we need an auteur like you. What the festival needed, after an opening week as bereft of headlines as this one, was a big bang, and “The House That Jack Built” delivered it — though given that it features an intensely compelling movie star as a human butcher, and serves up his crimes with a glare that’s as matter-of-fact as it is intense, it hardly needed to be a great work to provide that. When a hundred people walked out of the screening midway through, to von Trier that must have been the equivalent of cheers and applause.

Von Trier, to me, hasn’t made anything close to a masterpiece since “Breaking the Waves,” in 1996, and “The House That Jack Built” doesn’t spoil that record. It’s halfway between a subversive good movie and a stunt. It’s designed to get under your skin, and does. But it would have gotten under your skin more if it offered a humane counterpart to Jack — if it didn’t remain so fixated on Matt Dillon’s disaffected zombie drone.

The opening episode sets the tone: Jack is driving along in his hand-painted, windowless cherry-red van, and he picks up a woman whose car has broken down, played by Uma Thurman with a flirtatious hostility that seems almost designed to goad someone into becoming a serial killer. Jack has never murdered anyone before (has he thought about it? We aren’t told), but it doesn’t take long for him to smash her face in with a broken car jack — which makes us think, after a thousand movies and “Law & Order” episodes: How is he going to get away with this?

The lackadaisical crime-hunt dimension gets explained by the pre-forensic ’70s setting. And also, to a degree, by the kind of luck that’s part of what lends serial killers their confidence: When a state line favors Jack’s quick hiding of Thurman’s car, or when (after the second incident) he drags the victim’s body along the road, face down, from the back of his van, which seems like an act of grandiose self-sabotage, and then watches the rain wash away the trail of blood and flesh he has left behind, it’s as if something in the cosmos were looking out for him. Jack creates a serial-killer handle for himself — “Mr. Sophistication” — and von Trier keeps playing David Bowie’s “Fame,” though it’s a ham-handed device, since the notion that serial killers seek celebrity is a cliché (and one that’s not necessarily borne out by what we see here).

If you’re sensing that there might just be a tinge of sadism toward women in “The House That Jack Built,” von Trier, in this case, is both guilty as hell and — to a degree — bizarrely off the hook. Because, of course, it’s the character’s sadism. Then again, the question has to be asked: Is von Trier reveling in the misogynistic bad vibes? Is he getting off on it? That’s a gut call, and my gut in this case says no. That said, the fourth incident, which features Riley Keough, will leave you squirming with a discomfort that veers distressingly close to a torture-porn hangover. Keough’s Jaqueline — or as Jack, with rank distaste, calls her, “Simple” — is a young woman who dresses like a prostitute for a date with Jack. He comes over, and though he’s faking a leg injury, he’s no longer the geek. He’s stronger and more virile, and he’s got his victim where he wants her. But when he pulls down her top and begins to draw dotted cutting lines around her breasts, we think, “Oh, no…” And the movie follows through on our dread.

There have been a handful of films over the decades that have lured us inside the lives of serial killers. “The Boston Strangler” did it 50 years ago. And in 1986, Michael Mann’s “Manhunter,” the most accomplished thriller of the modern era, turned Tom Noonan into the greatest psycho since “Psycho” — and part of the horror was that we got to know him. But “The House That Jack Built” never gets us to fully identify with Dillon’s Jack. The movie is constructed from his point of view (there’s no one else’s), but he’s too much of a sicko not to draw back from.

Instead, we’re meant to stare right through him and lock into a cathartic kinship with von Trier, whose impulse toward subversion is working through Jack. From the start, Jack carries on a dialogue, heard on the soundtrack, with Verge (Bruno Ganz), a kind of metaphysical therapist confessor for serial killers through the ages; he’s like God crossed with the caretaker in “The Shining.” He has heard it all, and he greets Jack’s rationalization of his actions with a weary dose of Euro mockery. But what we’re really listening to is von Trier have a debate with himself.

The film keeps pausing for lectures: on the fermenting of grapes, the architecture of cathedrals, the Stuka dive-bomber, and the Nazi concentration camps (which plays as von Trier’s not-so-subtle apologia for his remarks seven years ago). Jack, in each case, is justifying his actions, treating murder as an art form. Whereas Verge keeps telling him that true art requires love. I think the meaning of all this is that Lars von Trier knows  he’s no longer creating films that are fueled by compassion, the way that “Breaking the Waves” was. He has become an artist of anger, of addiction, of the kinkiest extremes. And so now, he allies his view with that of a killer. “The House That Jack Built” ends with an epilogue that feels as if it starts over five times. Von Trier keeps trying to figure out how to deliver Jack into hell. But he dithers about it so much that the only message the movie leaves you with is that he doesn’t want to let go of him.

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Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition), May 14, 2018. Running time: 155 MIN.

• Production: An IFC Films release of a Zentropa, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image, Cophenhagen Film Fund, Eurimages,  Film I Väst, Film und Medien Stiftung NRW, Nordisk Film & TV Fond production, in cooperation with Concorde Filmverleih, Danmarks Radio, Les Films du Losange, MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Nordisk Film Distribution, Potemkine, and Sveriges Television, with support from Danish Film Institute, Swedish Film Institute. Producers: Louise Vesth, Jonas Bagger, Marianne Slot. Executive producers: Piv Bernth, Peter Aalbaek Jensen.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Lars von Trier. Camera (color, widescreen): Manuel Alberto Claro. Editor: Molly Marlene Stensgaard. Music: Victor Reyes.
• With: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Gråbøl, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies.

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‘The House That Jack Built’ Review: Sick, Violent and a Total Bore

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By Wesley Morris

• Dec. 13, 2018

About 10 minutes before Matt Dillon whacks Uma Thurman across the face with a car jack in “The House That Jack Built,” I was thinking about the last time I really didn’t want to see a movie. And the winner was each of my afternoons spent with an installment of “The Human Centipede” torture trilogy. There’s something about knowing that you’re minutes away from watching a psycho surgically conjoin a stranger’s face to a different stranger’s rump that makes you want to be someplace else.

So it’s a sort of relief that, for as sick and violent and sadistic as Lars von Trier’s new film is, “The House That Jack Built” fails to conjure anything as diabolical and morally outrageous as nonconsensual head-to-heinie. His movie is missing the clarity of vision to whip psychopathology into something rousingly intellectual. It fails to make depravity an experience that either stimulates or appalls. If I wanted to leave von Trier’s movie, it wasn’t because I was nauseated.

The whack Dillon gives Thurman in the opening minutes is the first indication that we’re dealing with a loon. It’s also the first sign that we’re dealing with a bore — in both Jack, the serial killer Dillon’s playing, and von Trier. The movie arrives with a whiff of scandal. The rampant grisliness reportedly sent people at the Cannes Film Festival storming out the theater. But, at Cannes, that can be a badge of honor and also just Day 6. The version we’re seeing is merely R-rated now, and is said to run shorter and therefore luxuriate less in the nastiness. It’s very nasty nonetheless.

[ Read more about the director and his latest scandal. ]

It’s also tedious, ponderous, obvious and humorless. The movie loosely follows a five-act structure in which Jack takes us to his walk-in fridge (piled high with bodies and frozen pizzas) and talks us through some of his greatest kills. They’re mostly of women. Thurman plays a ritzy dame whose car breaks down and asks Jack for help. Their drive to the mechanic occasions both a harangue and winking commentary. Does Jack know, she asks, that his vacant blood-red van makes him seem like a killer? Actually, he couldn’t be a killer, she reasons, because he’s a “wimp.” Lots of people die in this movie — and, metaphor alert, a breast even becomes a change purse — but Thurman’s delivery of that word might be the most murderous thing that happens.

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Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built Is a Narcissistic, Ugly Slog

This review originally ran during the Cannes Film Festival.

It takes about an hour for Lars von Trier to make a predator/prey animal metaphor in his serial-killer movie, complete with archival nature-documentary footage and heavy-handed voice-over. According to Jack (Matt Dillon), creatively interpreting William Blake , there are tigers and lambs, and it is in the tiger’s nature to devour the lamb. Jack, of course, sees himself as a tiger — because he is a killer, but also because he likes to think of himself as an artist, burning bright and fearful. The lamb may die, but as he sees it, it has “been bestowed with the gift of living forever in art. And art is divine.” I can’t remember if his simultaneously belabored and banal musings come before or after Jack taxidermies a child he’s gunned down, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. The House That Jack Built is a film that Cannes has been collectively bracing itself for since the news that the festival’s ban on the filmmaker, put in place after he “joked” about “understanding Hitler” at the 2011 edition, had been lifted. Word of the film’s excessive violence only exacerbated that (I heard a rumor that felt like the work of some creative PR, that paramedics and stretchers would be on hand for audience members at the premiere who couldn’t handle it, because Cannes definitely needs more of a Fear Factor vibe). As it turns out, the film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art. In some respects, Lars von Trier seems to only know how to make films about himself anymore; rarely has the work been so hermetic and lifeless.

Matt Dillon plays Jack, a serial killer with out a twist — when a victim of his played by Uma Thurman meets him, one of the first things she tells him is that he … looks like a serial killer. And he does. He has creepy wire-rimmed glasses, drives a windowless red van, and doesn’t blink much. Over the course of the film he tells his story to an unseen listener, in five “randomly selected” incidents that take place over a 12-year period, and not necessarily in sequence. We see him bash in the skull of Thurman’s busybody with a car jack, strangle a widowed woman and drag her bloody body down the road, and shoot down a girlfriend and her two young sons on a “hunting trip,” just to name a few. Throughout this selected playlist of murders, Jack explains his theories about how and why he is driven to kill other humans, going off on tangents that range in subject from Gothic architecture to dessert wines to, of course, the Holocaust.

At one point his guide remarks how disproportionately his victims tend to be women — and women that Jack seems to think are pretty stupid, at that. One of the more unfortunate sequences involves Riley Keough as another girlfriend (how does Jack find these women? We’ll never know) whom Jack has taken to calling “Simple.” Because she’s so dumb, you see. It’s a hateful, ugly sequence that culminates in Jack drawing dotted outlines around each of Simple’s “perfect tits,” for their eventual dismemberment, and letting her even go so far as to scream and go to the police, knowing that nobody in this von Trier–written world will do anything to help her.

There is nothing to be learned in any of this, because von Trier doesn’t really care to think about if or how a viewer might be changed by a film of his, only how he is changed by making it. This is unfortunate, because I’ve been changed by a few von Trier films in my day (last and most significantly 2011’s Melancholia, at whose Cannes press conference he made his now-infamous “I’m a Nazi” comment) . During another diatribe about art’s relationship to our darkest desires, von Trier flashes through scenes from his entire filmography, and I remembered fondly going into those films with my aperture open, even if they didn’t work for me, or did but didn’t age well. With Jack, von Trier is doing so much to repel and keep us at arm’s length that it’s hard to engage with the film with any kind of seriousness, from its sadistic violence to its Divine Comedy finale. You can only tell yourself those mangled children’s corpses are fake so many times before the rest of the film feels fake as well.

Von Trier, for all his redeemable and irredeemable faults, is a singular and talented artist, and there are flashes of technical and rhythmic virtuosity in Jack that I couldn’t help but admire through my grimace. An early scene where Jack, going through a period of OCD, keeps returning to the scene of a crime, imagining blood under every surface he forgot to clean, makes you feel the anxiety of the disorder, the itchy restlessness. Von Trier can be a filmmaker of great empathy when he wants to be, but it’s exhausting to see him unable to think about the artistic process as anything other than a predator/prey dynamic, something which necessarily must hurt others in the process. It hasn’t helped him in the past , and it’s certainly not helping him now.

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‘the house that jack built’: film review | cannes 2018.

A homicidal spree that doubles as an autoerotic ego massage, Lars von Trier's episodic bloodbath sneers at the controversy that got him banned from Cannes seven years ago.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Never has Lars von Trier worn the badge of bad-boy provocateur with more pride than in The House That Jack Built , even if it’s not always clear whether the film’s self-importance is mischievous or in earnest. Ostensibly a probing portrait of a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s , the movie also is quite literally a descent into hell. But its true raison d’etre is as a masturbatory dialectic about art and creation in which visual nods to Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin and Idi Amin give way to images lifted from across the Danish director’s entire body of work.

Returning to Cannes seven years after being banned over his ill-considered jokes about being a Nazi sympathizer, von Trier is anything but contrite. When you come back with a movie rhapsodizing about the aerodynamic perfection of Germany’s WWII Stuka dive bombers, lauded for their target accuracy and their terror-inducing sirens, you’re not saying sorry, but more likely looking to get a rise out of your audience.

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Likewise, the director appears to be addressing more bluntly than ever the charges of misogyny that have been lobbed at him periodically since he put Emily Watson through sexual and spiritual torment 22 years ago in the operatically powerful Breaking the Waves . Working here via the soft-spoken avatar of Matt Dillon ‘s title character, von Trier orchestrates a methodical display of sadistic violence against women, even bumping off two young boys for good measure, then subjecting their devastated mother to a gruesome family picnic before ending her misery. There’s nothing like the coldly detached killing of children to spark waves of walkouts.

It seems a direct FU to the current climate of reckoning over gender bias and sexual misconduct when the unrepentant Jack bemoans the misfortune of being born male and therefore guilty, asking: “Why is it always the men’s fault?” He even goes as far as saying women make more cooperative victims: “Easier to work with.”

Clearly, all this is designed to provoke adverse reactions. But what if instead of outrage and indignation, the response was a numb shrug?

Don’t get me wrong — The House That Jack Built is definitely something to see. But what’s most surprising is that it’s just as often inane as unsettling. Von Trier has created memorable roles for women even as he made their characters suffer. Think not only Watson in Breaking the Waves but Nicole Kidman in Dogville , Bjork in Dancer in the Dark , Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia . The women in this bloated new film, with the exception of Riley Keough — who generates real pathos and gets the nastiest butchering — are characters only in the sketchiest sense of the word, therefore we feel almost as little as Jack does when he dispatches them.

The movie is structured as a quizzical dialogue — complete with cue cards — between Jack and a sardonic interlocutor named Verge (Bruno Ganz). That enigmatic figure remains unseen until more than two hours in, when his classical literary identity is spelled out for those who didn’t guess it, and his Divine Comedy role made explicit.

Jack outlines his achievements by selecting five representative “incidents” out of a purported 60 or so total kills, starting with the one that first set him on the path of mass destruction. He stops to pick up a stranded motorist with a broken car jack, stiffly played by Uma Thurman as such a monster of mocking superiority, she practically goads Jack into whacking her, even providing the weapon. You can almost hear von Trier chortling with glee as he imagines us all guiltily thinking she had it coming.

Perhaps anesthetizing us to the violence was part of the point. But it makes the murders just grisly punctuation in the didactic voiceover exchanges about Jack’s OCD tendencies (or ordnungszwang , as Verge more grandly puts it), his narcissism, his intelligence, his lack of empathy or his subconscious desire to be caught. Even with all the fancy detours into Glenn Gould, William Blake, gothic cathedral architecture and dessert wine production, this is pretty much serial killer 101.

Segments of muddy animation showing the lengthening and shrinking of shadows under a lamppost describe the space between pleasure and pain that dictates when Jack needs to kill again. But as Verge points out, this is standard addiction-speak, and about as exciting as a PowerPoint presentation.

Some will get hot and bothered over the blatant anti-Americanism that is nothing new for von Trier. For the ill-fated picnic outing with the mother ( Sofie Grabol ) and her sons, the entire group sports red baseball caps that scream Trump’s America even without the MAGA slogan. Other images seem designed to pick at national wounds like the 1998 killing of James Byrd Jr., his body dragged behind a pickup truck; or the barbaric mutilation of Sharon Tate by the Manson family. More than once, Jack points to a culture of indifference that allows murder to go unseen and screams for help to go unheard. The trouble is, it’s all a bit obvious to take seriously.

Dillon throws himself unflinchingly into the role, getting progressively more reckless and agitated as Jack’s trail of carnage grows. There’s droll humor in his aspirations to turn his murders into iconic works of art. He arranges the bodies in trophy photographs that he sends anonymously to local newspapers, signed Mr. Sophistication, with David Bowie’s “Fame” used to hammer his hunger for notoriety. But Dillon’s performance is constrained by the fact that Jack’s most remarkable qualities are more often discussed than shown. Sure, it’s a grim spectacle watching him fashion a taxidermy popsicle out of a dead child, but for a psycho-killer, he’s on the dull side.

Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard weaves in a wealth of archival material to illustrate the discussions between Jack and Verge. The film’s grainy visual texture, however, is mostly unremarkable, with cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro’s handheld camera darting nervously back and forth between killer and victim in what becomes a monotonous pattern. The post-picnic tableau is certainly striking, as is a flashback to Jack’s childhood, observing field workers cutting the meadows with scythes. (That interlude also includes the film’s most casually horrific image, involving shocking cruelty to an animal.)

Von Trier and production designer Simone Grau Roney save the real visual flourishes for the concluding stretch, in which Jack’s architectural ambitions finally are realized; and in the epilogue that follows, when Verge guides Jack to his inevitable ultimate destination. It remains open to interpretation whether von Trier also is consigning himself there as an artist, just as it’s up for debate whether the movie is actually glorifying human suffering.

The jokey shift in tone over the end credits to Buster Poindexter doing “Hit the Road Jack” suggests there’s not really a consistent thesis of any kind behind all the windy discourse. It’s ironic, however, that the frequently brilliant von Trier is so intent here on proclaiming his own genius at great length in one of his least forceful films.

Distribution: IFC Films Production companies: Zentropa Entertainments31 , Zentropa Sweden, Slot Machine, Zentropa France, Zentropa Koln Cast: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz,  Uma  Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan,  Sofie   Grabol , Riley  Keough , Jeremy Davies, David Bailie Director: Lars von Trier Screenwriter: Lars von Trier, based on an idea by Jenle Hallund , Lars von Trier Producer: Louise Vesth Executive producers: Tomas Eskilsson , Thomas Gammeltoft , Leonid Ogarev , Peter Aalbaek Jensen, Charlotte Pedersen Director of photography: Manuel Alberto Claro Production designer: Simone Grau Roney Costume designer: Manon Rasmussen Editor: Molly Malene Stensgaard Visual effects supervisor: Peter Hjorth Additional direction: Anders Refn Casting: Des Hamilton, Avy Kaufman, Lara Manwaring Sales: TrustNordisk Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)

153 minutes

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The House That Jack Built Review

10 Dec 2018

The House That Jack Built

Whether filming self-administered clitorectomies or unsimulated sex, or expressing Nazi sympathy at press conferences, Lars von Trier loves to cause headlines. He sends controversy before his films like a leering herald. Shock is one of his tools and when used well it can harshly underline his films’ message. When used needlessly it just looks childish. The House That Jack Built is seeping with horrible moments — a breast sliced off; a taxidermied child; a mutilated duckling; the casual hunting of a family — all in service of a lumpen point that is being made better in many other places. His gruesome instincts are not underlining his intent but scribbling over it.

The film opens in pitch darkness. Jack ( Matt Dillon ) and an unidentified man ( Bruno Ganz ) are conversing in a way that indicates Jack is being led to some sort of afterlife and reflecting on his existence. He tells his companion about the murders he has committed, illuminating five randomly chosen ‘incidents’ (some have single victims, others multiple). They range from the bludgeoning of an annoying woman ( Uma Thurman ) seeking help with a broken car, to a picnic/hunting lesson that ends with a woman numbly trying to feed her child pie as his brain leaks out of the back of his head, to a casual date with Jacqueline ( Riley Keogh ) that ends with the aforementioned breast removal as she screams to a world that’s not listening. Jack discusses all these incidents as his art, his statement on a society beneath him. The joke is that Jack is a banal man who offers the world nothing. He is a trained architect but attempts to build his own house are stymied by his limited vision. In a very darkly comic sequence, Jack’s OCD forbids him to leave a crime scene before repeatedly checking every surface for blood. He gives himself the murder-moniker Mr Sophistication. Yet he achieves his goal of notoriety. Narcissism trumps talent.

Von Trier’s message is clear: a nihilistic statement on the mess of our world and specifically America, and the ascent of men who believe declaring yourself the best means you are, with no burden of proof. Jack has Trump-ish vocal and physical tics when delivering his lies; the hunted family wear MAGA-y red caps. The metaphor doesn’t need further explanation, but von Trier jams in a clumsy soliloquy in which Jack moans that the white man is always the bad guy, as he stabs a bound woman.

“The world is fucked” is a message you can read in countless places — von Trier is joining the discussion, but all his lurid, gory presentation can’t disguise that he has little to add. He even seems bored by himself, at one point illustrating a damning rant with a montage of older, better von Trier films. Upsetting scenes might make you look away, but there’s not much else to see here.

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The house that jack built.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 9 Reviews
• Kids Say 16 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Extreme violence, nudity, language in serial killer story.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The House That Jack Built is director Lars von Trier's detached but very, very brutal look at the career of an active serial killer (Matt Dillon). Expect extremely gory, graphic violence -- including bludgeoning, strangling, stabbing, torture, child murder, and manipulation of dead…

Why Age 18+?

Film is an examination of violence; that's its focus/purpose. Extreme cruelty, g

Profanity includes "f--k," "goddamn," and "crap."

Bare breasts/semi-nude dead bodies shown in a violent context (see "Violence").

Some drinking.

Any Positive Content?

Definitely not a message film. It doesn't even argue that "crime doesn't pay."

The main characters are a psychopathic killer and a demon. The other characters

Violence & Scariness

Film is an examination of violence; that's its focus/purpose. Extreme cruelty, glorification of brutality will disturb sensitive viewers. Seen through eyes of killer who highly approves of his actions, so tears/suffering he causes via torture and murder are presented positively. Graphic bludgeonings, stranglings, knifings, etc. -- mostly inflicted on women, some on children. A woman's bare breasts are marked for removal by the killer; the removal presumably occurs while she's alive, and then the severed body parts are later used by the killer. Cruelty to animals.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Bare breasts/semi-nude dead bodies shown in a violent context (see "Violence"). Buttocks shown in another scene.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

The main characters are a psychopathic killer and a demon. The other characters are humans who are basically objects for the killer's "art" projects.

Parents need to know that The House That Jack Built is director Lars von Trier 's detached but very, very brutal look at the career of an active serial killer ( Matt Dillon ). Expect extremely gory, graphic violence -- including bludgeoning, strangling, stabbing, torture, child murder, and manipulation of dead bodies. There's nudity (breasts, other body parts) in a cruel, violent, menacing context. Language includes "f--k" and more. Sensitive viewers are likely to find the movie's content extremely disturbing, and it's absolutely not for kids. Bruno Ganz , Uma Thurman , and Riley Keough co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (9)
• Kids say (16)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Extremely Violent And Disturbing Pitch Black Comedy with Social Commentary

Pure insanity., what's the story.

In THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, Jack ( Matt Dillon ) -- a methodical, well-funded man with OCD who also happens to be an extremely prolific serial killer -- is being escorted to hell by someone named Verge ( Bruno Ganz ). Jack and Verge chat about Jack's "career," with plenty of graphic flashbacks to his murderous acts and the "art" projects he undertook using corpses as material. Among his targets: women played by Uma Thurman , Siobhan Fallon Hogan, and Riley Keough .

Is It Any Good?

Is this relentlessly vicious film a satire on humans' capacity for evil, an examination of psychopathy, or a senseless dive into depravity? Probably all of the above. Celebrated auteur Lars von Trier 's cinematic skill can't be denied. Pretty much every film he makes is masterfully executed: His scripts, cinematography, casting, editing, and use of music, as well as the performances he elicits are usually very good. Sometimes great. But his fascinations can lead to places most people wouldn't care to go. Perhaps some of that is artistic courage. Perhaps some is morbid obsession. Whatever the engine, the ride is likely more enjoyable for the driver than the passengers. Von Trier's Nymphomaniac Vol. I & II , for instance, were hard-core sex at its most joyless.

What audience The House That Jack Built might have beyond an extraordinarily narrow, bloodthirsty niche is hard to say. It's a long (152-minute) parade of savagery. And that's the theatrical version; there's also a director's cut, for those who just can't get enough of graphic, close-up murders. If nothing else, von Trier seems to be enjoying himself -- though it's somewhat upsetting to think about what it means that he could make such a barbaric film that seems almost mischievous. The director even refers to himself in Jack , throwing in clips from his previous films as evidence of human malevolence. He also seems to revel in Jack's sadism, especially toward women. It's probably significant that, though Jack also kills men, it's the women we see tortured and brutalized on-screen. Jack and Verge ramble on about Jack's detachment and ambitions, offering descriptions of his behavior that will ring a bell with readers of Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test , but they never really delve into him as a person with an origin story. The film is very well made, with solid performances and occasional humor (as when Jack incompetently talks his way into a future victim's house), but it's likely to make most viewers sorry they entered the theater.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The House That Jack Built 's extreme violence . Why do you think there's so much of it in the film? Is it necessary to make the film's point? What is the film's point?

Jack says he has killed both men and women. Why, then, do you think all the extreme cruelty and brutality we see on-screen is inflicted on women?

Do you find the experience of watching this film enlightening, thought-provoking, emotional, satisfying? Why?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 14, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : February 4, 2020
• Cast : Matt Dillon , Bruno Ganz , Uma Thurman , Riley Keough
• Director : Lars von Trier
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : IFC Films
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 152 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong disturbing violence/sadistic behavior, grisly images, language, and nudity
• Last updated : April 25, 2024

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‘The House That Jack Built’ Review: Lars von Trier’s Construction of Violent Delights

Lars von Trier is doing his Lars von Trier shtick again.

Published December 10, 2018 Movies , Reviews By Matt Hoffman Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

It’s been eight years since Danish director Lars von Trier was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. In the meantime, von Trier released his two-part epic Nymphomaniac , completing his ‘Depression Trilogy’ (preceded by Antichrist and Melancholia ), and he finally returned to the festival – though out of competition – with The House That Jack Built , which is now hitting theaters.

This story of a serial killer ( Matt Dillon ) promised to be controversial, bloody, and disturbing, but could anything in this film be more upsetting than the extended home abortion sequence from the director’s cut of Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2 ? No, there is nothing in The House That Jack Built that any viewer would find more disturbing than the content of Antichrist , Nymphomaniac , or the endings of any of von Trier’s early films. If anything, this so-called ‘disturbing’ film is rather light, at least by von Trier’s standards. There’s also a surprising amount of humor to be found in Dillon’s Jack, an OCD-ridden serial killer on a voyage to hell.

Even for one well versed in von Trier, The House That Jack Built can be a difficult film to unpack. It’s somewhat unclear what, if anything, von Trier is trying to say with the film. Though not a part of the unofficial trilogy that preceded it, the film bears many similarities to Nymphomaniac . Stylistically, the two films are nearly identical. Von Trier’s last outing is mirrored through camera movements, lighting, tone, and format. This makes the hope that the director will break new ground somewhat devastated. It is perhaps worth noting that Nymphomaniac and The House That Jack Built are the first films von Trier has made since abandoning drugs and alcohol. The result is two films that are deeply contemplative. So what we have here is a filmmaker looking back, analyzing not only his previous work but also the man he once was, and the second man whom he has now become.

For this reason, one could even compare The House That Jack Built to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . Like Vertigo , von Trier’s is a film that reveals the ruminations of the relationship between actor and director. Von Trier, like Hitchcock, is known to have tortured his actors, particularly his female leads, to near insanity. Nicole Kidman and Bjork have spoken publicly about mistreatment from the director, though statements from von Trier’s most recent collaborators (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kirsten Dunst, and Stacey Martin) have defended the director, perhaps signaling that he has changed his processes. Though sober and arguably easier to work with, von Trier nevertheless carries his demons and chooses to reflect upon them through The House That Jack Built ; a film that asks what differences sit between filmmaker and serial killer.

The film is split up into five chapters, each depicting a murderous scenario featuring the title character. In these five chapters, the slaughtered are mostly women – with the male victims being two children. The opening chapter features Uma Thurman as ‘Lady 1’. It’s a surprisingly hilarious chapter for the opening of a supposedly brutal film. Though, is there anything more von Trier than subverting the expectation to be disgusted with some dry serial killer humor? The dynamic between Dillon and Thurman is so deliciously – and hilariously – tedious that viewers will exhale a sigh of relief when Dillon finally smashes Thurman’s face in with… wait for it… a busted car jack. The following chapter features  Siobhan Fallon Hogan , an actress who has offered small, haunting performances in previous von Trier films Dancer in the Dark and Dogville . In this chapter, von Trier once again utilizes a farcical setup, this time with bloodier delights. Jack’s battle with OCD is detailed as he continually returns to the scene of his crime to check for missed blood splatter. The comic setup continues into tedium, and just as it seems like the film may be losing grasp, it cuts to Fallon Hogan’s body, wrapped in plastic, being dragged violently behind Jack’s speeding van as David Bowie’s “Fame” blasts overtop. At this moment, the film reminds viewers not to get too comfortable.

The facetiously witty tone of the film’s first hour quickly erupts into existential dread as the film enters its third chapter, and from there it becomes deeply contemplative. Jack is killing to reach a goal, yet continues to put his operations at risk. Not simply comfortable with slipping through the cracks, Jack demands to be seen. As Jack descends further into his personal inferno, von Trier turns his thought inwards. As was frequent in Nymphomaniac , philosophical digressions begin to intercede with the narrative. Talk of murder turns into talk of cathedral arches and a surprisingly fascinating deconstruction on the decomposition process of grapes. It all seems to be a bit rambling, yet it’s obvious that these ramblings are one of a brilliant thinker. As Jack reflects on his work, von Trier reflects on his own, boldly inserting clips of his own films into a digression on genocide and tyranny. The two men, who are one and the same, ask what a lifetime of work builds to.

What has Lars von Trier achieved, if anything, after thirty-four years of feature filmmaking? How many murders will it take for the construction of Jack’s house to be completed? The answers to these questions remain a mystery. The House That Jack Built offers deep thought, but on a first viewing it remains unclear what it all adds up to. One thing that is for certain is that the often funny, sometimes shocking film is surprisingly fun to watch. I often caught myself in a wide-eyed smile throughout the screening. So what does that say about me?

[Note: This is a review of the “director’s cut” which played Cannes 2018, but the version released to theaters is reportedly edited to some degree.]

Tagged with: Cannes 2018 Film Festivals lars von trier

Matt Hoffman

The House That Jack Built (2018)

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The House That Jack Built

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'The House That Jack Built' Review: Lars Von Trier's Serial Killer Movie Is Sometimes Hilarious, Often Fascinating, And Always Full Of Sh*t [Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma]

Lars von Trier has never exactly been subtle. His characters often talk nakedly about their films' themes, serving as mouthpieces for von Trier's ruminations on various subjects. His metaphors are incredibly on the nose; this is a man who made a film about depression by having a literal planet loom overhead, ready to crush all in its way. Though his ideas are almost always interesting, his execution varies between rapturously artful and thuddingly obvious. The House That Jack Built is all of those things and more – and also von Trier's most self-indulgent movie to date.

The Art of Killing

Based on its marketing, you'll likely go into The House That Jack Built expecting a serial killer movie. In large part, that's what you get: Matt Dillon delivers a unique and committed performance as Jack, an engineer with OCD who is also a brutal and cruel serial killer. We follow Jack's career in killing from his first, opportunistic murder (Uma Thurman), through his "growth" period, up until the moment of his death. Along the way, Jack's modus operandi evolves from strangulation to shooting to more outlandish methodologies. Jack is relentless in depicting the psychopathic mind and actions of its protagonist. Through voice-over narration (in the form of a conversation between Jack and Bruno Ganz's mysterious confessor figure), it digs into Jack's psychology, touching on his childhood and exploring his own peculiar philosophies on murder. As the film progresses, Jack's initial OCD-driven fussiness gives way to more reckless, risk-taking behaviour, and Dillon's performance becomes wilder and more terrifyingly confident along with his killing. As one would expect, the film's violence is incredibly gory. Jack's victims are impaled, their heads smashed in, their kneecaps shot out, their body parts cut off, and worse, all treated with a willfully shocking level of realism. Von Trier doesn't shy away from violence against animals or children, either, deploying some highly effective editing sleight of hand to make that violence hit as hard as possible. Jack is psychologically cruel, too, playing sadistic games with many of his victims – including one that involves a long-con seduction of a mother and her two kids. Paradoxically, despite Jack's brutal violence and dark psychology, this is also probably von Trier's funniest film. Many of Jack's kills are treated almost like comedy sketches, completely aware that the audience knows what's eventually coming next. Thurman's character, picked up by Jack when her tyre pops and jack breaks (ha, ha), spends her final moments theorising about how a serial killer could exploit the situation in which she finds herself. Siobhan Fallon Hogan almost reprises her memorable role from Men In Black as another victim, in a trio of sequences that go from cringe comedy to absurdist comedy to the goriest, funniest sight gag you've ever seen. Dillon nails it all, even turning a scene of Jack practicing "normal" facial expressions in the mirror into a borderline Carreyesque gurning display. There's a really strong, jet-black comedy in here. A nice surprise!

The Killing of Art

There are two more significant layers to The House That Jack Built , and the first is strong, if not exactly original. Jack's voiceover repeatedly comes back to the notion of art: he considers himself an artist, and his victims his medium. What starts out as narration turns into a conversation with a therapist, then something else entirely, and all through it, Jack returns to his reverence of himself as an artist. That takes on a literal shape as, after his first murder, he starts storing his victims' bodies in a walk-in freezer, posing and freezing them in twisted tableaus – which he photographs with a medium-format camera. His murder projects are no more terrible (and far less elaborate) than other cinematic serial killers like Jigsaw or John Doe, but as his collection of corpses grows, forming a gruesome art gallery of sorts, you really get a sense of his obsession. And that obsession reflects back on himself. Jack is an engineer, but wants to be an architect; while he's trying to complete his murder art, he's also trying to build a house, repeatedly commencing construction before tearing it down and starting anew. His repeatedly drawn distinction between architects and engineers suggests he considers himself on a higher plane than others do. "Engineers read music," he says; "architects play music." I would've gone for "play" and "write," personally, but there we go. The central question here revolves around whether or not great art is worth the destruction wrought to create it – and whether destruction in and of itself is an art. What's Jack's place in all that? This "murder as art" metaphor has been used many times before, but rarely with this degree of investigation. For a fairly small-town engineer, Jack is incredibly well-read on art history – suspiciously so, even. Had Von Trier stopped there, he'd have made one of the best films of his career. But the fucking guy just can't help but make it all about himself.

Poor Lars Von Trier

There's a lyric in the Manic Street Preachers song "Faster" that goes, "self-disgust is self-obsession, honey," and it came to mind often while watching Jack . Von Trier's murder-to-art comparison isn't merely allegorical. It's a one-to-one representation of himself, specifically, as a tortured and maligned artist known for hurting people in the course of making his films. Von Trier tries so hard to shock, pummelling the audience with not only his own serial killer narrative but also footage of historical atrocities, that the shocking imagery becomes banal white noise. The shock is merely there to elevate the director's sense of purpose; intercutting footage of Nazi concentration camps with literal clips from his own films  – underneath a monologue about "great art" – is the height of arrogance, calling to mind his Cannes ban while seemingly proclaiming himself a figure as historically significant as Adolf Hitler. Jack's monologue about how men are unfairly treated (delivered to "Simple," the only woman named in the film) inspires eye-rolls as much as it does indignation. By the time the film's epilogue has Jack barricading himself inside his artwork and wondering whether he can climb out of literal Hell, no amount of astonishing imagery (of which that epilogue has plenty) can overcome the dreariness of von Trier's ode to himself. By positioning Jack as an avatar for himself, as he so blatantly is, von Trier might think he's being self-effacing or even self-flagellatory. But the tone he strikes here is one of defensiveness, railing against the plebs who don't understand his art, his pain, his struggle. Ganz's character offers token challenges to Jack's philosophies, but von Trier paints them – and thus, his critics and audience – as small thoughts from small people, beaten down by endless monologue to which nobody can respond. The narcissism on display isn't lessened by this on-the-nose discussion; it's heightened by it.

The House That Lars Built

Do we need to consider the director in looking at a work? Shouldn't we be able to consider the work on its own merits? Whatever your opinion on the matter, Lars von Trier's mind is set. There's no way to watch The House That Jack Built without factoring its director into things – largely because the only way he could have inserted himself more into the film is by casting himself as Jack. The House That Jack Built is so very nearly a terrific, smart black comedy about death, art, and morality. But it descends so completely into self-centered masturbation (or more of a cry-wank) that the ultimate takeaway is what a dick the director is. His script makes overtures at depth, but it's all there on the surface: this is Lars von Trier, expounding upon his greatness from beneath a thin veil of self-deprecation. I don't begrudge anyone for doing some soul-searching. Therapy is a difficult and important thing to do. Transformative, even. But therapy tends to happen privately, not on cinema screens for paying audiences, and it absolutely has to be approached with genuine self-reflection. Von Trier could have told the same story, and even made the same observations, without proudly dumping his specific baggage onto the screen. But of course, he didn't. The House That Jack Built is a winking, sorry-not-sorry response to its director's critics; a petulant manifesto for his particular brand of on- and offscreen cruelty; a self-important passion play with Dillon as a transparent stand-in. Lars von Trier is a man with a megaphone standing on a mountaintop, screaming for onlookers to pity how narcissistic and flawed he is. And this is the house that he built.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: A Journey Into The Darkest Depths Of Lars Von Trier’s Mind

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Lars Von Trier may have the infamous reputation of being the most notorious edgelord of arthouse cinema, but it feels like his history of provocative comments is starting to catch up with him. Think back to 2011, when he began his Melancholia press tour telling reporters that he thought his own film was “boring”, before getting himself declared persona non grata at the Cannes Film Festival for claiming to understand Hitler.

Lars and the Real Murderer

Although it’s been seven years since his cringeworthy attempts at humour, the spectre of that press conference hangs over every frame of The House That Jack Built . His latest film uses a similarly self-analytical conceit to Nymphomaniac , as a series of random incidents in the titular character’s life are dissected in extensive detail through the guise of being questioned by a quasi-audience surrogate bemused by their actions. Jack’s cold-blooded murders are presented as allegories for Von Trier ’s own creative process, but the film cuts far deeper than merely reshaping the same allegory as his previous film.

Whereas Von Trier previously joked he “understood” a man responsible for the biggest atrocities ever committed, here he equates himself with a serial killer to try and see if they both see the process of creating art through a warped lens – and whether or not he is capable of sincerely understanding a man responsible for committing great evil. One of the most surprising things about The House That Jack Built is that even Von Trier , a filmmaker with a penchant for nihilism, struggles to find any humanity within a monster built to resemble himself.

Originally conceived as an extensive TV series, one of the few flaws of The House That Jack Built is the fact that it eventually stretches out its central metaphor to the detriment of the film around it. Von Trier ’s necessity for self analysis in-between the different episodic murders becomes increasingly repetitive, at times simply rehashing the same moments of self criticism from his previous film. At one point, an extensive monologue about the pain and suffering that goes into art blossoms into a montage of random scenes from his filmography, as if anybody was still struggling to grasp the entire thing is a twisted euphemism for his tortured creative process.

If this doesn’t becoming grating enough, the voiceover discussions on the subject between Dillon and Ganz are hindered by a distracting echo effect on their vocals, intended to mimic the sounds of two men speaking from an otherworldly realm, yet in practice sounding like Von Trier forgot to choose the correct vocal setting on Garageband. The self reflection isn’t a problem; instead, the issues stem from the fact the narrated arguments don’t progress after making their initial point, especially when the same theme being analysed so intensely in these moments is central to the narrative itself, making the digressions increasingly unnecessary.

A Film only Von Trier could have made

The character’s earlier attempts at serial murder are defined by their sheer ineptitude; in the film’s standout comic moment, Jack desperately tries to get into an elderly woman’s house under the guise of being a policeman, only to then change track and declare himself an insurance salesman halfway through. Dillon mines comic gold from the sheer desperation in this circumstance, and yet in retrospect this might be the most shocking thing Von Trier has achieved with the film. Making you expect more subsequent dark comedy, before pulling the rug from under our feet and throwing us into a literal and metaphorical journey into the depths of hell, where no sliver of comedy can undermine the invasive nihilism.

There are still moments of deadpan absurdism firmly in the background (from the fact Jack’s freezer has little space for corpses due to excess amounts of frozen pizza, to the crime scene item he uses as a wallet), but after slowly gaining a sickening amount of broad comic gravitas, we eventually start to see the making of a true psychopath. We are told Jack has murdered over sixty people, with the story unfolding over an indefinite amount of time – and as we get deeper into his “career”, so to speak, Dillon ‘s performance becomes one of the most unsettling in the director’s filmography. Which is truly saying something.

The more depraved Jack gets, the more apparent it is that Von Trier is using the character as a means of analysis to the controversies that have followed him throughout his career. The vast majority of his victims we see are women, and prior to murdering one of them (a woman he nicknames “simple”, played by Riley Keough ), he goes on an extensive diatribe about how he detests a society that he believes positions men as being responsible for all the evil in the world.

Although there’s an unintended dark comedy to hearing a serial murderer of women espouse views straight from the men’s rights activist playbook, especially in an era when society is finally reckoning with these extreme views, this is more clearly drawn to display the most extreme parallels with Von Trier himself. Prior to his “depression trilogy” collaborations with Charlotte Gainsbourg , he had a notoriously difficult reputation with his actresses, culminating last year with Bjork decrying her difficult experience working with an unnamed “Danish director” ( Bjork ‘s slim IMDb filmography attests to this being Von Trier ) as part of an open letter.

The manner in which we see Jack control women, forcing them into emotionally vulnerable states so they have no choice but to subject themselves to his murderous tendencies, seems of a piece with the emotional manipulation Bjork appeared to be describing on the Dancer in the Dark set. As a writer, Von Trier has always been dogged by accusations of misogyny, even as he wrote some of the most powerful female roles in recent memory – here, he once again seems to be reckoning with these accusations, just like in Antichrist , but in the most deliberately despicable manner he knows how. It’s not exactly understated in this allegory, but it is undeniably fascinating; a director so burdened by the personal and professional mistakes in his past that he feels equating himself with a murderous misogynist is a logical step.

The House That Jack Built:  Conclusion

What are your thoughts on  The House That Jack Built ?

The House That Jack Built is released in the UK and US on December 14, with an extended “director’s cut” playing for one night only in the US on November 28. All international release dates are here . 

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Review: Lars von Trier’s Empty, Repugnant Provocations in “The House That Jack Built”

Pull your pants down in public, you’re an exhibitionist; pull someone else’s down, you’re a sadist; pull someone else’s down and talk about it, you’re a moral philosopher. That’s the mantle that Lars von Trier, a longtime filmmaker of cynicism and cruelty, adopts in his new film, “The House That Jack Built.” It’s a drama about a serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon), and it depicts his reminiscences of five episodes of murder from among the dozens that he has committed, interspersed with his intellectualizing rationalizations of his life of crime. The action is set in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, yet it hardly makes contact with the particulars of those times (other than props and costumes). Rather, von Trier relies on the film’s tired premise (yet another serial-killer movie, set this time in an age before cell phones) to embrace a wide (though absurdly shallow) range of cultural history.

The movie has a framing device that’s a bit of a mystery at the start: throughout his criminal exploits, Jack is in internal dialogue with another, unseen character, whom he calls Verge (voiced by Bruno Ganz). They’re on a long trip together: Verge is leading, Jack is following, and, in the course of their journey, Jack is confessing to a series of what he calls “randomly chosen incidents” selected from his twelve-year killing spree. Those reminiscences, punctuated by the men’s dialogue, are the substance of the film, and it soon becomes clear that Verge is Virg—i.e., Virgil, who, as in Dante’s Inferno, is guiding the protagonist’s soul down to Hell.

Sounds cool on paper. Yet the movie’s five episodes of murder, sticking close to Jack’s confessions, offer little backstory and little context outside his arachnid schemes. In effect, each of the movie’s five segments is an extended variety of the ear-cutting in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”: Jack makes contact with, or is already in the company of, his victims, and he toys with them, in anticipation of what may be the moment of opportunity or only the moment of desire, in which he can enact the violent plan he has in mind. (There is an unrated director’s cut of the film that contains approximately four minutes of additional material, which I haven’t seen, but the R-rated version includes plenty of gore and horror. For instance, there’s a sickening scene in which Jack cuts off a woman’s breasts, a deed that, reportedly, is depicted more explicitly in the longer version.) Each murder also has its aftermath: Jack owns a walk-in freezer in a desolate part of town (the action is set in the state of Washington), where he stashes—rather, stores—the bodies of his victims, and his transportation of the bodies there, in his red van, along with the circumstances of their storage, becomes a part of the action as well.

Only a few brief sequences offer any psychological illumination of Jack’s amoral pathology. In one, he candidly presents himself as an emotionally inert person who, in order not to attract suspicion, teaches himself to feign emotional responses, practicing making faces in a mirror to express emotion; in effect, he trains himself to become an actor, modelling his facial expressions on those of people in closeup news images that he has pasted onto the wall around his mirror. A similar touch of psychological insight arrives in the aftermath of a killing, when Jack—admitting, in voice-over, his obsessive tendencies and compulsive cleanliness—imagines bloodstains in unlikely places in a victim’s house and returns to the scene of the crime to examine those places (such as the wall space behind a hanging picture). There, von Trier poignantly (if glancingly) suggests the torments that Jack endures as an element of his mental illness. Otherwise, von Trier does little but revisit his longtime theme: the world’s eternal duo of the calculating predator and the ignorant victim. Here, Jack presents it in a description of the tiger and the lamb (with reference to poems by William Blake), neither of which is guilty and both of which are merely following their natures.

Jack’s confessional narration also has the air of a self-justification, which he delivers in the form of his philosophical discourses on aesthetics. In his youth, Jack aspired to become an architect; he complied with his mother’s insistence that he become an engineer instead, and, now, having inherited a large (unspecified) sum of money, he attempts to satisfy his long-frustrated ambition. In a farcically literal rendering of the movie’s title, he buys a remote piece of lakeside property, designs a small house that he builds as a paper model in his pristine studio, and sets out to build it. “The House That Jack Built” depicts Jack’s architectural frustrations and exertions as his longtime and central motive for his career of murder.

This theme of frustrated artistry leading to a life of murder suggests, from the start, that “The House That Jack Built”—the first film that von Trier has made since “ Nymphomaniac ,” from 2013—is a direct offshoot of, or perhaps a trolling follow-up to, the infamous press conference he gave at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2011. At the conference, which was meant to be centered on his film “ Melancholia ,” he spoke with an offensive frivolity about Jews and Nazis. He said, among other things, “I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end . . . I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit, yes.” He also praised Albert Speer’s artistic sensibility and the realization of it in the Nazi regime. Von Trier’s remarks got him banned from Cannes, to which he returned only this year, with “The House That Jack Built.” In the character of Jack, he presents a starkly simplistic illustration of the shibboleth that it was Hitler’s failed artistic career that led him to a sadistic politics.

Jack’s discussions with Virgil take a philosophical-historical turn that’s centered on the aesthetics of killing—and that both allude to one of the most famous modern art works about the Holocaust, “Schindler’s List.” In that film, in a scene of trivializing vulgarity, Spielberg joins a scene of S.S. officers’ murderous raid of an apartment building’s Jewish residents to a performance of a Bach keyboard work. Von Trier, doubling down on Spielberg’s wink and nudge about the dubious moral implications of classical culture, repeatedly and even obsessively punctuates “The House That Jack Built” with recurring inserts of a clip, from the 1959 documentary “ Off the Record ,” of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould playing Bach—casually, devoutly, joyfully—in the living room of his isolated country house. Von Trier adds to the cultural mishmash a riff by Jack in praise of Speer’s concept of the beauty of ruins and the steps that Speer took to realize it, a parody of Bob Dylan’s onscreen cardboard sloganeering in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back,” a goofy sidebar of analogies on the production of sweet wine, and Jack’s dialectical joust with Virgil in which the Roman poet (speaking while his remarks are illustrated with majestic images of classic paintings) asserts bombastically that the essence of art is love.

Virgil’s statement is the philosophical straw man against which von Trier tilts. Jack—who expressly and recurrently refers to his murders as his art—defines beauty not in terms of love but in terms of what he calls icons, and he doesn’t mean soup cans or pop singers. Rather, Jack refers to images of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other tyrants as supremely iconic, and asserts that they, and images of them, are beautiful art. What’s more, he presents their crimes as iconic as well, and, in a series of film clips that’s dominated by images of the Holocaust, of survivors of Auschwitz in the barracks, of piles of bony corpses being bulldozed into mass graves, he calls these atrocities art, says that they’re beautiful, and asserts that his own crimes should take their place in history alongside these other so-called art works.

What Jack ends up creating, as his ultimate work of art (and his ultimate house), is too aggressively and solemnly ridiculous to describe, let alone spoil. The trite story and frivolous speculations of “The House That Jack Built” might have gained authentic aesthetic resonance if, rather than casting Matt Dillon in the role of Jack, von Trier had played the role himself. Even if von Trier is no actor, the very amateurishness of his own incarnation of the philosophical serial killer might have created a sufficient distance from the action—while also invoking his own investment in it—to emphasize its personal and emotional underpinnings rather than its sensational effect.

The world may not need another serial-killer movie, but it’s certainly possible for an artist to make a significantly insightful work on the subject—just as the seemingly bottomless reprocessing of the Nazi phenomenon suggests the ongoing desire and the unsatisfied effort to understand it. Yet von Trier does neither; he simply dallies with disgusting images and ideas in a carefully calibrated, ante-upping ploy to attract attention—he is the best advertiser for himself in the modern-day movie business (as suggested in his emphasis on the primary value of iconic images). He’s the cinematic counterpart to the right-wing trolls who, in the mild guise of frank confrontation with difficult ideas, seek to normalize and extend the reach of their destructive program. I don’t think that von Trier is actually an extreme rightist, or any kind of ideologue, but, rather, that he’s a casual provocateur whose flip, adolescent café-table musings about the nature of art and the art of nature are as simplistically shocking as his gory and sadistic drama.

Von Trier gives the impression of understanding his role in the contemporary cinematic landscape and embracing it enthusiastically. His body of work, with “The House That Jack Built” at its forefront, is the negative image of the wan and sentimental so-called humanism that passes for the summit of the international art-house cinema, the cinema of Cannes, the cinema that’s all too often celebrated by bien-pensant critics. Von Trier, by contrast, is the mal-pensant filmmaker who, with a clever sense of calculation that is superior to his films themselves, gets the very same audience of progressive culturati to see his works of contemptuous inhumanity and give them prominent and careful consideration—to acclaim them, or even to insult them, which is just as good.

There’s a creaky joke in which the critic says, “I’ve seen this movie so that you don’t have to.” But when I write a review, it’s with the assumption that readers should see the movie in question—any movie worth writing about at length is, despite any shortcomings, worth experiencing for oneself. With “The House That Jack Built,” it’s different: the clearest way to confront its new levels of willful, attention-seeking provocation is to avoid it altogether.

‘The House That Jack Built’: Lars von Trier’s Serial-Killer Movie Is One Huge F–k You

By David Fear

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.

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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 Sal ò ? 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.

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Review: ‘The House That Jack Built’ an uproarious portrait of a less-than-perfect family

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“The House That Jack Built” first impresses as a sitcom involving a large and uproarious ethnic household. Jack (E.J. Bonilla) moves his entire clan into a multi-family brownstone in the Bronx to keep it close-knit. But this family portrait is far from his picture-perfect ideal, prompting Jack to meddle in everyone’s affairs.

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Jack tells white lies to shield his parents from his pot-dealing and his sister Nadia’s (Rosal Colon) same-sex relationship. He plays mediator to defuse marital discord between his mother, Martha (Saundra Santiago), and his father, Carlos (John Herrera), as well as between his brother, Richie (Leo Minaya), and his sister-in-law, Rosa (Flor De Liz Perez). Jack’s nagging fiancée, Lily (Melissa Fumero), prematurely picks out a wedding dress, while there’s also a turf war brewing around his corner.

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Written by “Hangin’ With the Homeboys” filmmaker Joseph B. Vasquez and produced close to two decades after his death, the film still feels gritty and authentic, thanks to director Henry Barrial.

The personality flaws of the characters and the dysfunctions of the household are instantly recognizable from this very capable cast, yet they never come off as cliché. Vasquez came from a broken home, so perhaps he had longed for one like this one.

------------------------

“The House That Jack Built.”

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

Playing: Arena Cinema, Hollywood. Also on VOD.

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The 10 Most Disturbing Crime Movies, Ranked

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Crime dramas are one of the most important genres in the history of film , as it is impossible to look back at the history of the medium without thinking about all-time classics like The Godfather, The Maltese Falcon, On The Waterfront, or Taxi Driver . Crime films have often been at the foray of pushing the film industry forward in terms of incorporating explicit content on screen; even when Hollywood dealt with more serious censorship issues, crime films were able to hint at darker themes that many studios would traditionally shy away from.

Today, crime films are where many of the most exciting filmmakers are working to make exciting and potentially divisive , even though the genre has been dominated by many prestige television shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and The Wire . Here are the ten most disturbing crime films, ranked.

Editor's note: The following contains discussion of unsettling, graphic and violent content. Please be advised.

10 ‘Oldboy’ (2003)

Directed by park chan-wook.

Oldboy has one of the most upsetting plot twists of all-time , but that’s not the only reason why Park Chan-wook ’s captivating 2003 thriller is one of the most disturbing films ever made. Oldboy is a film that questions the value of revenge , as it suggests that any acts of vengeance are bound to result in even more violence and catastrophe.

Oldboy became renowned for its brutal fight scenes , including the infamous “hallway sequence” which has inspired many other “one shot” moments in popular projects, most notably in the first season of the Marvel Netflix series Daredevil . The depiction of torture, sexual assault, mental health dosorders, and drug abuse make Oldboy a completely unique reinvention of the crime thriller genre that is very hard to watch more than once, even for those that can stomach disturbing content on a regular basis.

Oldboy (2003)

After being kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years, Oh Dae-Su is released, only to find that he must find his captor in five days.

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9 ‘American History X’ (1998)

Directed by tony kaye.

American History X is unlike any other drama film because it seeks to unpack the origins of the country’s racial discrimination issues. Edward Norton gives one of the best performances of his career as a former neo-Nazi skinhead who goes through a significant change when he is imprisoned, and begins seeking out a path of redemption.

American History X includes extremely upsetting depictions of hate crimes, sexual assault, and police brutality , all of which sadly feel just as relevant today as they were when the film was first released in 1998. What’s most upsetting is that American History X does not sanitize its narrative in the hope of giving an easy solution to an issue this complex; the shocking moment of violence that ends the film indicates that the cycle of hatred and bloodlust cannot easily be stopped, even if redemption is possible.

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8 ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ (2011)

Directed by lynne ramsay.

We Need To Talk About Kevin evokes modern fears about the epidemic of school shootings by delving into the mind of a disturbed teenager ( Ezra Miller ) and his complex relationship with his mother ( Tilda Swinton ). The brilliance of We Need To Talk About Kevin is that it does not treat the outburst of violence as a major plot twist; the audience is well aware of what’s coming, and is forced to sit with the uncomfortable ending that the film is hinting at.

We Need To Talk About Kevin brings to life every parent’s nightmare about raising a monster , and shows the shame, guilt, and anxiety that are specific to the maternal experience. Director Lynne Ramsay has a history of making very visceral crime movies, but We Need To Talk About Kevin is certainly the most disturbing film that she had made thus far in her career.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

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7 ‘Bad Lieutenant’ (1997)

Directed by abel ferrara.

Bad Lieutenant was a subversion of the typical “heroic cop” narrative that had been perpetrated by many crime films , as Harvey Keitel gave a transfixing performance as a corrupt law enforcement officer who is assigned to track down the criminals responsible for assaulting a Catholic nun. Bad Lieutenant is among the rare NC-17 rated films that actually made a sizable dent at the box office, as generally the restrictive rating limits the commercial potential.

Bad Lieutenant depicts harrowing moments of violence, drug abuse, and sexual assault that are disturbing because of how realistically Abel Ferrara directs the film’s analysis of police and criminal culture. While the film touches on potent themes of sin and forgiveness , it is also the type of project that is meant to provoke extreme reactions out of its audience because of how bleak its worldview is.

Watch on The Criterion Channel

6 ‘Bad Education’ (2004)

Directed by pedro almodovar.

Bad Education is one of the many masterpieces of Pedro Almodóvar’s career , but one of the few instances in which the beloved Spanish writer/director used his aptitude for sprawling ensemble stories for a crime drama. Bad Education is a film that viewers may need to take multiple viewing to fully comprehend, as it incorporates several plot twists and fluctuating character identities; that being said, Bad Education is also a harrowing examination of sexual abuse that may be difficult to watch more than once.

Bad Education is a harrowing look at the lingering effects of childhood trauma that has real empathy for the victims of abuse, thanks in no small part to the brilliant performance by Gael García Bernal . The similarities that Almodovar draws with more traditionally crowd pleasing coming-of-age narratives only makes the subtext of Bad Education more disturbing.

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5 ‘The House That Jack Built’ (2018)

Directed by lars von trier.

The House That Jack Built is proof that Lars Von Trier is the most uncompromising filmmaker of his generation , as none of the controversy surrounding his work on Nymphomaniac or Breaking The Waves dissuade him from making his most disturbing thriller yet. The House That Jack Built is a look into the mind of a truly disturbed serial killer, played in a haunting performance by Matt Dillon , who had once been a generational heartthrob with his work in The Outsiders and Drugstore Cowboy.

The House That Jack Built is unafraid to get darkly comic when detailing its violent sequences , forcing the audience to question how far they are willing to go. Nothing about the experience of watching The House That Jack Built is intended to be pleasant, but the idea that Von Trier was able to laugh at some of the most extreme acts of savagery somehow makes it even more disturbing.

The House That Jack Built

In five episodes, failed architect and vicious sociopath Jack recounts his elaborately orchestrated murders -- each, as he views them, a towering work of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest.

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4 ‘Wild at Heart’ (1990)

Directed by david lynch.

Wild at Heart is perhaps the darkest film of David Lynch’s career , as even a narratives as oppressive and disturbing as Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me leave the door open for some amount of hope. Comparatively, Wild at Heart is a disturbing venture into the dark side of the “American dream” that retrofits the iconography of Elvis Presley music and The Wizard of Oz into a dark road trip adventure about two lovers having to elude the forces that seek to drive them apart.

Wild at Heart is quite shocking in its depiction of evil , as Willem Dafoe plays one of the most evil characters that have appeared in any of Lynch’s films. Although aspects of the film are quite gritty, the surrealist influence turns the somewhat straightforward set up into what feels like waking up from a nightmare.

Wild at Heart

Young lovers Sailor and Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula's mom has hired to kill Sailor.

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3 ‘Se7en’ (1995)

Directed by david fincher.

Se7en kicked off a wave of serial killer films in the 1990s , but managed to get far deeper into the psychology of disturbed villains than many of its imitators. David Fincher created a series of graphic murders, each of which are more disturbing than the next; the iconic ending featuring the excruciating death of Gwyneth Paltrow ’s character has been seared in the memories of every moviegoer that was taken by surprise when they first witnessed it. However, some of the most disturbing moments in Se7en are those that Fincher leaves open to interpretation.

Se7en is particularly disturbing because Fincher’s world view is so cynical , as evidenced by the haunting final line from Morgan Freeman . Fincher would return to the serial killer genre with Zodiac and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo , but Se7en remains the most visceral project that he has ever worked on about the subject.

Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives.

2 ‘Man Bites Dog’ (1992)

Directed by rémy belvaux.

Man Bites Dog was a radical reinvention of the mockumentary genre that follows a group of fictional filmmakers that track the activities of a serial killer. While most mockumentaries tend to be more comedic in the vein of This Is Spinal Team or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping , Man Bites Dog explores the concept to its logical extremes as the film crew begins aiding and abetting the serial killer that they are intending to cover.

Man Bites Dog has a lot to say about how willful ignorance is an issue in media, and its use of realistic crime scene photography only makes the central conceit more disturbing. Man Bites Dog isn’t just a collection of disturbing moments of murder and assault, but a condemnation of audiences that seek out these types of stories and don’t think about the events that inspired them.

Man Bites Dog

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1 ‘Funny Games’ (1997)

Directed by michael haneke.

Funny Games is a masterwork from director Michael Haneke that plays with the cinematic medium to create an ambiguous story that breaks the fourth wall. Unlike traditional slasher films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or A Nightmare On Elm Street, Funny Games presents serial killer characters who look and feel like normal people up until the point that their dastardly evil plans are revealed.

Funny Games is disturbing because it uses the home invasion genre to destroy the concept of safety , giving the victims no room to feel safe in any capacity. Although the film can certainly be perceived to be a satire of the indifference of the wealthy class that is never held accountable for their privilege, there’s never a moment when the rampant abuse and torture that the characters are forced to go through is not upsetting to watch.

Funny Games (1998)

KEEP READING: Every Jack Ryan Movie, Ranked by Rewatchability