Harefooted Halloween: The House That Jack Built

What I Liked: The premise about a serial killer regaling Death/God/Angel about five of his favorite murders is pretty good.  They have a philosophical conversation about life, death, love and the meaning of it all.  It’s a very old European style of storytelling like a French or Italian film from the 50’s or 60’s.  Nobody makes movies like that anymore (at least I don’t think so) and it’s a refreshing throwback.

Matt Dillon’s (To Die For) performance is weird.  Sometimes he’s manic like Nicolas Cage and other times he’s downright mean.  But I never found him terrifying which is interesting.  He’s a handsome dude that can throw a goofy smile your way and it becomes hard to take him seriously.  I’m putting this in the “liked” category because some serial killers have the ability to flip between charming and conceited on a dime and Dillon mostly pulls that off.

Some of the imagery towards the end when it gets abstract and dream-like is quite stunning.  I can’t really go into what you’re looking at without spoiling it but the shift to this more extreme art style, especially compared to the very matter-of-fact pseudo-documentary style the rest of the film uses, isn’t as jarring as you might think.

What I Didn’t Like: The two and a half hour running time could’ve been tightened up.  Most of the stories drag a bit with Dillon playing with his victims for too long either before or after the kill.  And because we have these one on one conversations in between the segments there’s a lot of material to get through.  At least one segment should’ve been cut.

The editing is erratic.  There’s too much use of repeated shots and moments we’ve already seen throughout the movie.  There’s also a lot of closeups and jumping in time and parts where Dillon holds up white placards with stuff he’s narrating written on it like in Dylan’s music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.  So really the whole way this is shot and edited is kind of a mess.

The brutality of the slayings is pretty damn uncomfortable.  Just to give one example Dillon hunts a mother and her two adolescent sons with a rifle.  Later he poses one of the sons like he’s waving and gives him a Joker wide smile that’s infinitely creepy.  He freezes the corpse in a walk-in freezer so it’ll remain in that position.  Probably the thing that sticks with me the most though is a quick shot of Dillon as a ten year old snipping off a duckling’s leg and throwing it back in a pond.  That got to me more than any of the hostile stuff towards humans.  This level of bluntness isn’t my cup of tea, however…

Overall Impressions: movies like these need to exist.  I don’t really like this one but someone needs to push the viewer’s buttons and find out exactly where that line in the sand we all have is.  I’m an unabashed lover of horror films and a good chunk of my favorites include some very nasty shit.  But the way the violence is portrayed, the characters, the technical aspects, the storytelling, etc. is generally entertaining.  I don’t think Lars von Trier (Antichrist) makes entertaining pictures.  It’s more like you get through them.  This is only the third movie of his I’ve seen and the one I like the most so far but I’m not a big fan of the guy.  His shit is depressing as fuck and he’s too obviously poking at you deliberately to get a reaction.

With Jack von Trier probably thought he was making either a satire or the most realistic depiction of a serial killer ever.  The tone is hard to pin down because there are appalling moments like the ones I described above but also silly ones like when Dillon haplessly tries to convince a woman to let him in her house.  He’s failing hard getting nowhere until he finally flat out promises to give her money if she opens the door.  The movie also ends with a cover of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” which completely clashes with the last moments and everything else you’ve sat through.  Again, I firmly believe von Trier is messing with you and daring you to hate it.

I appreciate the existence of von Trier’s films but goddammit, I do kinda hate them.