6/18/2023 0 Comments The house that jack built![]() ![]() He also likes to tempt fate, taking chances that are completely…well, insane. 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. Jack is by turns cunning and sloppy, arrogant and opaque. 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.īut that’s also a problem for the film. He also strangles, stabs, mutilates, and fires bullets in full-metal-jacket casings. (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. ![]() 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. 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. It’s folly, on some level, to try and “explain” them. There’s an integrity to that, since serial killers are weirdly wired animals. (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. And that’s not just because a lot of it doesn’t track along the spectrum of reality-based storytelling. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive. “The House That Jack Built,” however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. That’s a memorable image of the evil men are capable of. 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. 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. Jack takes the corpses to the walk-in freezer where he stores the bodies of all his victims. But the truly creepy moment arrives after that. It is, instead, the most deadening and dispiriting film that its director has yet made.OK, that’s horrible. Lasting two and a half hours, this is neither a conventional crime drama nor a self-reflexive essay film. Often, his jokes – if they are intended as such – fall flat. At one stage, he throws in archive footage of the Nazis, as well as stock images of predators in the natural world.īut despite some laughter in the dark, The House That Jack Built soon begins to drag. He seems to dare viewers to laugh at events that could not be crueller or more bleak. Von Trier relishes combining banality (cars breaking down, weapons not working) with evil. Occasionally, The House That Jack Built is funny in its own dark and deadpan way. ![]() The same description could be applied to Jack. “I’m a serial neurotic, a hypochondriac, and I’m frightened of everything I can’t control,” the director once said of himself. Von Trier is riddled with strange compulsions and preoccupations. The killer is perhaps intended as the director’s own alter ego.
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