He stalks a mother ( Sofie Gråbøl) and her two sons, then ghoulishly arranges their bodies in a mock picnic, forcing her to feed her dead child a slice of pie before shooting her in the head. Jack strangles a woman ( Siobhan Fallon Hogan) in her home and then drags her body behind his car, her face shredding into goo on the asphalt. This continues on, each segment wildly outdoing itself. We see, throughout the movie, glimpses at the results: the bloody, caved-in skull of a beautiful woman who was murdered for simply seeing through the veneer of a destructive male ego.
He drives her to a nearby mechanic, and she taunts and annoys him-accuses him of looking like a serial killer, practically begging him to do her in-until he eventually murders her by bashing her face with a tire-jack. In the opening chapter, he finds his first victim ( Uma Thurman) on the side of the road as she’s having car trouble. The film tracks Jack as he hones his sadism, weaponizing his latent misogyny and picking off women-any woman, really, but the ones that annoy him most are assigned the cruelest fate. His “Antichrist”-and-beyond era is especially troublesome, as his focus narrowed to a field of vision that sees only the pain perpetuated against women, often by themselves: a woman slicing off her clitoris with a rusty pair of scissors, another ravished by depression and burned to a crisp in a cosmic apocalypse, and another so addicted to sex that she’s found beaten and urinated on in her film’s opening chapter.Īnd then there’s von Trier’s latest, sickest work, “The House that Jack Built,” a two-and-a-half-hour Hell journey through the baroque mind of a modern-day serial killer, played by Matt Dillon. But to enter willingly as a woman adds an extra layer of malignancy. All parties are guilty, and good morale is sacrificed. Watching von Trier is entering into a deranged agreement.
The shame of knowing full well the things he’s done, like drunkenly calling himself a Nazi at a Cannes press conference, or getting naked on set in front of female actors, or telling Nicole Kidman he wanted to “ tie her up and whip her” during rehearsals for “ Dogville,” or sexually harassing Björk on the set of “Dancer in the Dark.” Things I acknowledge, and that sit like cold lumps in the back of my throat when I eagerly return to “ Breaking the Waves,” “ Melancholia,” and “ Antichrist.” Movies I adore, that invoke something beneath my skin, and that grow in meaning as I grow in age: Bess McNeil’s ( Emily Watson) mania and complicated relationship with religion in “Breaking the Waves” Justine’s ( Kirsten Dunst) cosmic depression in “Melancholia” Charlotte Gainsbourg’s She and her deep, psychosexual self-hatred in “Antichrist.” All feelings I’ve vacillated between in my adulthood, but also feelings that are drenched in the poisoned blood of their creator, irrevocably tied to his mounting misdeeds-and perhaps mine, too.
It is the shame of being a woman, and therefore a target of his artistic rage. There is inherent shame that comes from my fascination with von Trier.