Before I began writing this testimonial, I realized that it would be appropriate for me to look into the antecedents of the “owner” of the film. As it turned out, director Lars von Trier was banned in 2011 from one of France’s most famous film festivals, the Festival de Cannes, for his extreme statements. His works are brutal, outrageous and raw. The director is constantly pushing the boundaries of good taste with his increasingly bold visuals – nothing proves this better than “The House That Jack Built”, during the premiere of which crowds left the cinema in large numbers. It is an extremely complex work in the genre of Danish-French-German-Swedish horror drama and quite difficult to digest in its history.
In two and a half hours, the film shows the murders committed by the protagonist, the mentally deranged Jack, the artist. The sociopath serial killer, as in so many films, is hidden behind a mask of a middle-aged man who has completed a seemingly average engineering career.
His character is spiced up with some obsessive, compulsive cleanliness mania. His obsession is building a perfect house, inspired by his series of amok runs and murders. His increasing blood thirst is less and less alleviated by the massacre of his victims, and construction is not going as planned. He wants more. Here it becomes clear to the viewer that the construction of a house is not interpreted by the protagonist in the same way as the average person does.
Some classify the work as a documentary, while others call it a feature film. One thing is for sure: I recommend it only to people with a strong stomach and nerves; but whoever can watch it to the end, will not experience a standard horror movie for a leisurely Saturday night, but an experience that will be mentioned and pondered over 2 to 3 days. The film is a social critique of superficiality, greed and evil from beginning to the end. Not only is Jack sick, but so is the world…