The House That Jack Built (2018) Review

 

The House That Jack Built (2018)

The House That Jack Built follows Jack as he illustrates 5 random murders over his 12 year spree, to the ferryman on his way to Hell.

I really enjoy going into a movie completely blind, having never heard of it before because it can either be really good or really bad, depending on your expectations. My expectations were cloudy, and so I found this really intriguing, in an introspective way. Jack is a self proclaimed architect, an artist in his own fashion, but not traditionally. His art is in the process, of death and decay, and how in this form, the end goal of life is not to live but to die. It’s all told in 5 parts with an overarching narration, which is a conversion that we find out is with Verge, the ferryman of Hell, who himself is appalled at the descriptions of such murders and the crassness by which he goes about them.

It’s oddly funny, but not in a Fargo way, more in that there is no timing and that it is simply uncomfortable in the tension and failure in which Jack goes about things. He gets oddly lucky, being careless for a serial killer with maddening OCD who by dumb luck never gets caught.

It doesn’t shy away from the gruesome crimes committed on screen however, and that’s what makes this so polarizing. It’s open season on hitchhikers, kids, prostitutes, and every day people in gory, unabashed fashion. That said, it’s never gratuitous. It has purpose and forces you endure a 2+hour trip to hell, while in reality, Jack has been in it this whole time.

We get a really interesting cast in Uma Thurman, Riley Keough, Bruno Ganz, and Matt Dillon. Dillon has always had that dark, serialistic quality to his acting, and it is phenomenal here, with him progressing vastly from a socially awkward individual to a freakishly scary killer with his only remorse laying in that he probably didn’t kill enough.

The House That Jack Built, directed by Lars von Trier, is a shockingly sick and twisted, but thoughtfully artistic journey into the mind of a serial killer, who finds an artistic beauty in what we would call horror. This horror is quite literally the building blocks for a home 12 years in the making.

9.1/10