Love him or hate him (and there seems to be very little in between), Danish filmmaker and enfant terrible Lars von Trier is a force of nature. While still in his 20s he made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival with his debut film, The Element of Crime, and he hasn’t really been out of cinema headlines since then. His stunning Breaking the Waves was the Cannes Grand Prix winner for 1996, and his Depression trilogy of Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac all caused equal amounts of acclaim and controversy. In 2017, The House That Jack Built premiered at Cannes, prompting both more than a hundred audience walkouts and a 10-minute standing ovation.
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He’s been banned from Cannes for a year after provocative comments about Hitler; he’s given us some of the most raw and vulnerable depictions of mental illness that have graced the screen. His films are notorious for graphic sex and violence, but there are actors and actresses, including Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Willem Dafoe, who sign up to work with him again and again. In the midst of all of this is The Kingdom (Riget in Danish). The first season aired on Danish television in 1994, followed by a second season in 1997. The third season suffered long delays after the deaths of two of the previous seasons’ main characters, as well as von Trier’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, but the final five episodes, entitled The Kingdom: Exodus, aired in 2022. Critic Leonard Maltin called seasons I and II “a must-see for those who think they’ve seen everything.” Let’s take a look at why it should be top of your to-watch list.
Genre-Bending Plot
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Where to start? The Kingdom is almost entirely set within the grounds of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, which the intro to every episode stipulates was built over former bleaching ponds, and that what is underneath is waking up, and evil will soon be coming to the surface. In season one we follow Mrs. Drusse, a not-actually-sick patient who schemes to get herself repeatedly admitted to the hospital because her psychic abilities tell her the building is haunted. She is assisted by her son Bulder, a large, good-hearted orderly, but constantly stymied by Stig Helmer, a Swedish doctor who hates her, as well as everything about Denmark and the Danes.
Not a lot of actual doctoring goes on, as the doctors are very busy with their secret society which holds meetings in the basement. Dr. Helmer tries to avoid prosecution for a botched operation on a young girl named Mona, who was left in a vegetative state, but also with psychic abilities (that no one seems to notice). There’s an unorthodox sleep lab; a doctor who purposefully transplants a cancerous liver into his own body; Haitian voodoo, a ghostly ambulance, and a Greek chorus that consists of two teens with Down Syndrome who work washing dishes in the hospital (in The Kingdom: Exodus, they are replaced by an actor with progeria and a robot).
Mrs. Drusse tries to root out the pervasive evil that haunts the hospital, but the doctors and nurses are too obsessed with their own rocky personal lives to take much notice until the evil threatens to swallow them all. The show is by turns wryly humorous, laugh-out-loud funny, science-fiction strange, and genuinely terrifying.
Completely Bizarre, Absolutely Off-Putting, Utterly Lovable Characters
Mrs. Drusse (played by Kirsten Rolffes) is really the heart of the first two seasons, scurrying around the halls in a pink robe, holding séances, getting her son Bulder to sneak her into restricted areas. It was Rolffes’ death (along with that of Ernst-Hugo Järegård as the Dane-hating Dr. Helmer) that shut down production after the second season. There’s Hook, a rogue junior surgeon who keeps the hospital stocked with black market goods, and his love Judith, who it seems is going to have a baby fathered by a ghost.
One of the most terrifying and yet most touching characters is Judith’s baby, Little Brother, played by Udo Kier (you read that correctly). Little Brother’s father (also played by Udo Kier) was a cruel doctor in the early days of the hospital responsible for the death of a little girl named Mary who now haunts the elevator. Little Brother’s gestation time is about three months, at which point he fights his way out of the womb, a freakish, long-limbed body with Udo Kier’s head that can talk and do other things babies are not meant to do. He’s scary and disgusting and also will absolutely move you to tears.
Side characters include the aforementioned doctor so obsessed with researching a particular cancer that he has it transferred into his body, Dr. Helmer’s sort-of girlfriend Rigmor, who shoots him in the leg and comes back in the third season as a patient sneaking up on people in the elevator, doctors who struggle with self-doubt, nutty psychiatrists, med students who can’t stand the sight of blood. Even the smallest character is a delight.
A Third Season Taste for the Meta
With such a long time between the second and third seasons, and actors who had passed away in the interim, fans were curious as to how the plot would necessarily change. The third season opens with a character who steps in for Mrs. Drusse, an amazing actress named Bodil Jørgensen who looks like Patricia Clarkson might in twenty years, in the role of Karen. We first see Karen watching the end of The Kingdom II, and she takes it upon herself to go right down to Rigshospitalet because she is worried about the fate of Little Brother. The staff seem to deal with this sort of nuisance all the time, and tell her the show was just filmed there, that it’s not real, and anyway the first season was better. But a lot of the familiar characters are there, if a bit older, and von Trier definitely enjoys teasing us: were the previous seasons real? Were they just a television show?
The generations have changed, if only somewhat. Stig Helmer has passed on, but his son arrives for duty, promptly joining the hospital chapter of Swedes Anonymous, where members commiserate over their love of Volvo, Tetra Pak, and Ikea and their loathing of all things Danish. Stellan Skarsgård appears in the second season as a shady lawyer, and his son Alexander plays his shady lawyer’s son in the third. One of the third season’s most off-the-wall fantastic moments is the brief appearance of frequent von Trier collaborator Willem Dafoe as a demon.
That Signature Lars von Trier Something
The most unexpected moments of pathos come at the end of every episode. In the first two seasons, Lars von Trier would appear in a tuxedo in front of a red velvet curtain, giving a sardonic little summary of the episodes events, concluding by telling us to always take “the good with the evil”, leaving us with a sign of the cross followed by the sign of the devil. In the third season, we hear his voice and we see the red curtain, but with a pair of shoes sticking out. Von Trier tells us that vanity has taken over him, and the years have not been kind; so he will talk to us from behind the curtain from now on. It’s not quite as funny, it’s a little bit sadder, but then you see the curtain ripple as he makes the signs of the cross and the devil, and you know that his sense of humor is alive and well, no matter how his body might be faring.
This may all sound bananas. And quite frankly, it is. But it is also one of the strangest, most compelling, utterly surprising shows you will ever have the privilege to watch. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll jump in fear. Just remember to always take the good with the evil.
