Lars Von Trier’s most recent film is The House That Jack Built, a strange and often disgusting serial killer movie starring Matt Dillon as Jack, and also features Uma Thurman and Riley Keough. Von Trier is widely regarded as one of the best (and most infamous) filmmakers on the planet, so it was no surprise that The House That Jack Built is such an excellent, compelling, and terrifying story.
The Serial Killer That Von Trier Built
Jack is an architect of destruction, an engineer of murder, an artist who uses human beings and their body parts as his art project, possibly because his career as an architect failed. At the film’s ghastly end, we realize what the title of the film refers to. Jack literally puts dead bodies together the way an expert would put together a house. It is incredibly shocking, but to Matt Dillon’s deranged character, what he has done is create a magnificent work of art that can be compared to many famous artists and composers (something also seen in the TV series Hannibal, arguably the best Hannibal Lecter adaptation). Not only is it a work of art, but it’s also a route to Hell and the underworld.
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Jack is able to dehumanize his victims because the bodies, to him, are just props. Not living and breathing beings, but simple props just waiting for him to kill them and make them live forever as morbid artwork. The emphasis is clearly on his lack of ability to empathize with others or see other humans as beings like himself.
He is a narcissist, believing himself to be superior in every way to the people he kills. He never shows regret or feels compassion. He never questions whether he is doing something wrong or whether he should stop killing. By the end, he has murdered 60 people; like most serial killers his victims tend to be of the opposite sex, but that does not stop him from killing men, children, and even innocent animals.
Jack lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which means that he spend an extraordinary amount of time cleaning his crime scenes so that he remains undiscovered. As his OCD subsides, he begins to engage in riskier behavior. He nicknames himself Mr. Sophistication in letters to the media and gets increasingly (and absurdly) more daring, an authentic serial killer touch.
Serial Killer Movies
One truth about serial killers is that at a very young age, they first show signs of psychopathy by engaging in cruelty to animals, which is the case here, in a scene that is particularly hard to watch. And he grows up to be a hunter, a skilled marksman with many rifles, shotguns, and other weapons, another trait prized by serial killers.
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Another thing that is true of most serial killers is that they take trophies. In this case, Jack goes beyond just taking trophies, and he actually saves the entire corpse. He keeps dozens of macabre creepy corpses in a freezer that he has access to, and he poses them and takes pictures of them as if he were a professional photographer. The scenes with the dead bodies posed together are so disturbing that they are hard to watch. So too is a scene where Jack kills two young kids in front of their mother, whom he then forces to “feed” her dead children before she too is killed.
These days, serial killer movies are extremely popular, and there have been some mammoth hit films and series about them, especially with the total explosion of ’true crime’ narratives in recent years. Se7en, the Hannibal Lecter movies, Kiss The Girls, The Snowtown Murders, Dahmer, Zodiac, Bundy — serial killer cinema is practically endless, a phenomenon to fill libraries, yet somehow most of them take the wrong approach to serial killers, leading to good movies that could be great if they were more authentic and stuck closer to reality.
The Human Mind and The House That Jack Built
The House That Jack Built is fascinating, because it’s both extremely stylistic and simultaneously authentic and honest, and not just an extremely realistic look at serial killers; it’s an extremely realistic look at the human mind and how it works. Throughout the film, Matt Dillon’s character has a constant inner dialogue in his head. The voice in his head talks to him and asks him questions and offers philosophical insight.
This is how the human brain works. It does not mean that we all suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder or enter into dissociative states where our mind seems to belong to someone else and we “hear voices in our head” and cannot differentiate ourselves from other beings. What it does mean is that the mind works because we have a conscious and subconscious voice which together make us human, and helps us make decisions. We are always in dialogue with ourselves, and The House That Jack Built realistically depicts how the mind works and explains how and why we do certain things.
In many serial killer films, the killer fits in perfectly with his surroundings and no one has a clue as to the true nature of the psychopath. That is not the case in this film. Jack is rude and imposing, and he does not project a false façade of normalcy. In the film’s first kill, Uma Thurman’s character pulls him over because she is having car troubles. He does not kill her right away but reluctantly tries to help her. She even jokes about the fact that he could be a serial killer many times, as he is a complete stranger to her. Finally, aggravated with such talk, he very quickly bashes her skull in and kills her in a most brutal fashion. The killing isn’t necessarily premeditated; it isn’t some diabolical master plan. He gets angry and explodes in an act of violence, and this is how many serial killers operate.
For most of his other kills, Jack remains without emotion. There is no joy, no macabre laughter, no expressions of glee that we see in so many modern serial killer movies. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas once said killing a person was just like squashing a bug, and that is the vibe that Jack gives off. This film neither glorifies nor condemns serial killers. What Lars Von Trier controversially accomplishes is a stunningly authentic depiction of a serial killer who could be real.
The House That Jack Built is also surreal at the same time, as Jack seemingly travels through the Dante-esque circles of Hell guided by Virgil, trying to escape his punishment. The whole final act of the film, taking the character and his audience into the pits of a Hell, is a bizarre, artistic touch that allows some philosophical rumination on the concept of evil, art, genius, and narcissism, filled with conversation and themes that brilliantly reflect on the nature of Jack, serial killers, and narcissistic, toxic men in general. This is definitely a daring film that people need to watch and study.
