Review of The House That Jack Built (2018) by Sarath R — 18 Dec 2018

VON TRIER'S INFERNO!

As a longtime fan of von Trier's work, I count this as one of his very best films. Sure, it's grisly in parts (but not half as violent or grotesque as the reviewers would have us believe). There are moments of pure Hitchcockian terror, like during the picnic scene, or when he's got poor Simple bound and gagged, and you KNOW what he's going to do (a shock motif that itself is borrowed from Bret Easton Ellis' shock novel "American Psycho"). But in reading some of the "worst" reviews, I am reminded of the people who thought Clockwork Orange was a horror movie, when it was so clearly a comedy. Like Kubrick's version of Clockwork, von Trier's House that Jack Built is among the blackest of satires ever committed to celluloid. It's bad reviews I mostly put down to sheer cowardice on the part of today's milquetoast critiquing class, who are more interested in scoring Brownie points by (and I truly hate to use this alt-right coined phrase, but God help us, it actually fits sometimes) "virtue signaling" to their readers about how "woke" they are, that they can't tell (or refuse to acknowledge) the difference between a movie having a misogynistic character and the movie, itself, being.

Misogynistic. Regardless, in the final equation, this film is intellectually ambitious, precisely written, beautifully performed, immaculately staged, groundbreaking in both form and content, unsparing in its self-exploration, and, ultimately, horrifying in its radical beauty.