The House That Jack Built (2018, Lars von Trier) (Patreon)

Thought for a while that I understood what Von Trier's up to here, and was completely on board. Rehash of Nymph()maniac's  confessional-cum-dialectic admittedly felt a bit lazy, but each of the first two Incidents hilariously undermines Jack's pompous claim to artistry, painting him as pathetic and inept. 1st Incident sees Thurman's stranded motorist browbeat Jack into becoming a serial killer, an idea that doesn't even appear to have occurred to him until she starts constantly suggesting ways that he might murder her; it's a masterfully disarming initial salvo, too darkly comic to register as victim-blaming. (I might have preferred a male victim, to avoid any hint of misogyny, but that wouldn't have served Von Trier's actual purpose, which is in part to interrogate that very charge as it's been made against him in the past.) Likewise the magnificent 2nd Incident, which imagines what it might be like if Inspector Clouseau or Chad Feldheimer decided to start killing random strangers (and suffered from OCD). All the while, Jack keeps insisting to "Virge"—a tad cute, that, though at least there's a literal payoff in the epilogue—that these miserable, maladroit crimes merit comparison not just to great architecture but to Picasso, Goethe, Bob Dylan. Its a bit like what Tarantino did with Stuntman Mike, except that Von Trier juxtaposes self-glorifying myth with sorry reality right from the jump, rather than creating a diptych. 

Or so I'd concluded at that point, maybe an hour in. But no, The House That Jack Built turns out to be The Self-Portrait That Lars Painted, and Jack, like an actual artist, gains confidence and authority as he continues to hone his craft. That's not to say that Von Trier isn't genuinely struggling with his demons here, wondering aloud whether he's devoid of empathy and whether that may be necessary to transcend the banal. But I found the 3rd and 4th Incidents, in which Jack exhibits near-total control and begins romancing the women he kills, not so much disturbing or distressing* as simply uninteresting. Black comedy gives way to standard-issue creeping sadism, oddly inflected in the 4th Incident by Kitty Genovese-style indifference (can't see how that fits into any autocritique, unless Von Trier's annoyed by how few people saw The Boss of It All) and an MRA rant that comes out of nowhere and feels like an atypically desperate bid at topical relevance. 5th Incident largely reverts to the previous tone, and the epilogue gets points for boldness and visual grandeur, but the movie kinda lost me over the course of that unpleasant, unilluminating hour. Wasn't offended or outraged, or even bored. Just indifferent, which I'm sure is the last thing Von Trier would ever want.

* Note to fellow chickens when it comes to onscreen torture and suffering: The big mutilation you might have heard about isn't nearly as graphic or prolonged as I'd feared. Still not fun to watch, mind you, but we're not talking about Audition here. It's mostly some truly gross stuff that happens afterward that kept the Cannes cut from getting an R.)