Starring: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Grabel, Riley Keogh, Jeremy Davies, Jack McKenzie, Ed Speleers, David Baillie, Emile Tholstrup
Distributor: Monster Pictures
Runtime: 152 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2019
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Writer-director, Lars von Trier, has encouraged controversy during his long career. And, controversy was raised with the present film, reports of audiences walking out.
It is clear that any audience can choose to see a film about a serial killer or not. If they make the choice, they can expect, at least, gruesome images. In fact, there are many gruesome images here, but not excessively gory (especially in comparison with the multiplicity of horror films in recent decades) not images that an audience who chooses to see the film would walk out of.
von Trier is trying to do something special in this portrait of a serial killer, an evil Everyman character, narcissistic and boastful, both shrewd and naive, misogynistic but not limiting his victims to women. And that something special is to invite the audience to 2 ½ hours of reflection on philosophy and art in the context of the life and the murders by a serial killer. In fact, and the art and the reflections are so interspersed throughout the film that they provide a substantial counterbalance to the gruesome images. One might wonder whether the audience who walked out of this film did not understand all the discussions, the meanings of the visuals and the music, or could not bother to work with them.
On the narrative level, there are five incidents in Jack’s murderous career, a driver with a car breakdown, a widow interested in insurance, a mother and two young children victims of hunting, a seductive young woman murdered in her apartment – and, in the fifth episode, a range of men, multi-ethnic, to be the target of an experiment with a full metal jacket bullet. There is also an epilogue, titled, Katabasis indicating downfall and death.
Matt Dillon is convincing in the central role, initially obsessively fastidious, OCD, but, gradually changing in appearance, feeling freer and becoming more unkempt. He has wanted to be an architect but is an engineer, building a model of a house, visiting the building site, building and then demolishing, a metaphor for his own life.
Throughout the film, there is a voice offscreen, a continued challenge to Jack about his behaviour, and response to his defending himself, a continued judgement on Jack – so that the audience is in no doubt about the film’s moral perspective on serial killing. The voice is referred to as Verge (Bruno Ganz) who eventually appears at the end, the classic Roman author, Vergil, – and Dante’s guide to the inferno in The Divine Comedy. One can hear commentators declaring von Trier as pretentious, in likening himself to Vergil – but, on reflection, this is obviously a 21st-century visual version of The Inferno, especially in its culmination.
And there are so many art references as well as discussions about the nature of art, creating art, Jack interpreting his murderous work as artistic. There are sequences with Glenn Gould playing the piano. There are visuals of architectural frameworks, Gothic cathedrals, the screen filled with a page of letters, an animation allegory about light and shadows for pleasure and pain, a wide range of paintings, especially classical, visuals by William Blake of God, of the Lamb of the Tiger, and a discussion about the symbolisms of innocence and violence.
Which means then that this is no ordinary serial killer thriller. Rather, it is a visualisation of a contemporary phenomenon of men who kill. It is also an invitation to a much wider range of reflection on being human, on good and evil, on depth and banality, and illustration of this reflection by all the arts. The film is a visual and verbal portrait, and visual and verbal analysis.
Peter Malone MSC is an Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
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