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Can a movie be both repulsive and captivating? Cinema’s enfant terrible, Lars von Trier, is back with one of his most challenging and confrontational films in a career not exactly known for playing it safe. Notorious for a Cannes response that included both a standing ovation and hundreds of walk-outs, “The House That Jack Built” is finally available to American audiences, in limited release and on VOD in a slightly-edited R-rated cut. Don’t worry. The “thrust” of von Trier’s vision remains to such a degree that it’s even hard to believe this version got an R (which raises the key question of “why bother cutting it at all?” but that’s for another piece). So what is that vision? It’s one that compares artistry with murder as the director draws direct lines between creating art and taking lives. The film finds von Trier wrestling with the claims of misogyny and misanthropy that have followed him his entire career, but not in the way you’d expect. If anything, he leans into both, daring you to look into the abyss with him as he interrogates his own dark side and banishes himself to the underworld. 

Jack ( Matt Dillon ) is a prodigious serial killer. He has killed dozens of people and he’s on his way to literal Hell, accompanied by a man who calls himself Verge ( Bruno Ganz ), modeled after Dante’s Virgil. As they travel through the circles of Hell, Jack describes five of his most brutal crimes, and we witness the evolution of a madman. His first “incident” took place when he picked up a woman ( Uma Thurman ) on the side of the road after she got a flat tire. The woman, never named, berates Jack constantly, wondering aloud if he’s a serial killer but basically calling him too weak to be one. After he's had enough, she gets a tire jack to the face. Get it?!?! A jack from Jack! Your tolerance for that kind of dark meta-humor will dictate a lot of your response to “The House That Jack Built.”

Jack’s crimes get more insanely violent and reprehensible, and nothing is off limits for von Trier. Jack murders a woman in her living room, guns down a family on a hunting trip, and in the film’s most misguided sequence, cuts off the breasts of a woman he has verbally berated and nicknamed “Simple” ( Riley Keough ). He tells her he’s going to do it. In fact, he’s constantly calling attention to his crimes, whether it’s the mechanic who saw him with his first victim or the guy he waves to on the porch of his second. Von Trier has claimed that there’s something of a Trump allegory at work in “ Jack ,” and it’s likely at least in part in how brazenly Jack commits his crimes. He’s almost begging to be caught, but no one seems to care enough to do so.

But, of course, despite pleas to see it as a Trumpian allegory, Jack is more of a stand-in for von Trier himself. He not only envisions his elaborate murders as works of art but arranges the bodies afterwards into an increasingly morbid tableau. He keeps the corpses in a giant walk-in freezer, and delights in moving them around like, well, a director moves actors on a screen. And Jack is something of an obsessive-compulsive, another trait he likely shares with a man who made a movie like “ The Five Obstructions ” (in which a director had to follow specific rules like, well, a serial killer who needs his crimes to be executed to perfection). And von Trier has been accused of misogyny on-screen and off, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Jack’s victims are mostly naïve women, although it's sometimes hard to watch.

What does all of this add up to? The film’s final stunning 20 minutes feature some of the most striking imagery of von Trier’s career, but you have to get through the torture of “Simple” and the shooting of children to get there. Is von Trier castigating audiences a la Michael Haneke ? Or is he almost parodying himself just to get a rise out of people? There’s a fine line between art and provocation, and the best parts of “The House That Jack Built” seem to be interrogating that line. Is this art? Is this vile? Can it be both?

So, is “The House That Jack Built” hollow provocation or dense commentary? I’m honestly not sure yet. It’s undeniably too long (153 minutes), often meandering through the same points over and over again in a way that becomes numbing, but there’s something more complex here than I think its critics are willing to see. Don’t get me wrong, I understand not being willing to dig through the horrors of this movie, and/or presuming there’s nothing to unearth, especially given von Trier’s track record of playful misanthropy. But von Trier remains a fascinating conundrum to me—a director who sees violence and pain on the same artistic spectrum as love and joy. Some might look at “The House That Jack Built” and say it’s completely lacking in the empathy we so often want from our artists, but I think von Trier would disagree, arguing that empathy requires understanding the entire human condition and not just its good side.

Does that make for entertaining or even thematically engaging cinema? Not always, and if anything frustrates me about “The House That Jack Built” it's that it feels less focused than his best recent work (“ Melancholia ,” “Nymphomaniac”). Some of the long conversations about art are naval-gazing garbage that would get someone kicked out of a college class. Ultimately, it’s more of an inconsistent cry into the void than the conversation starter it could have been. Most of all, like the serial killer who literally tells a cop about his crimes, von Trier just wants you to pay attention to him. Repulsed or fascinated—he doesn’t really care as long as you see him. It's up to you to decide if he's worth seeing. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

The House That Jack Built (2018)

153 minutes

Matt Dillon as Jack

Bruno Ganz as Verge

Uma Thurman as Lady 1

Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Lady 2

Sofie Gråbøl as Lady 3

Riley Keough as Simple

Jeremy Davies as Al

• Lars von Trier

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• Jenle Hallund

Cinematographer

• Manuel Alberto Claro
• Jacob Secher Schulsinger
• Molly Malene Stensgaard

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• The House That Jack Built Summary

by Lars von Trier

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

The movie follows the main antagonist, Jack , a psychotic serial killer, who must account for his crimes in Hell. Before he does so, he is led around the nine circles of hell by the Roman poet, Virgil (known as ‘ Verge ’), who details his crimes through a series of flashbacks.

The first murder starts off with Jack trying to help out a lady who has had some car trouble on the road. However, she is ungrateful for his help when it does not work out, and so he kills her and freezes her body in his warehouse. His second murder involves forming a friendship with a widow, Claire, and then proceeding to stab her. He is almost caught by a nearby police officer but manages to quickly hide her body in the bushes before he can see. This is when he begins to form his serial killer alias, "Mr. Sophistication", and starts sending in anonymous letters and photos of his victims to the police.

Jack is also shown to have difficulty forming a relationship with women, as seen by the killings of his two ex-girlfriends. He kills his first girlfriend’s children on a hunting trip and forces her to have a picnic with their corpses, before he kills her too. The murder of his second girlfriend, Jacqueline , is more gruesome as he chops off her breasts and keeps them as souvenirs.

Jack is eventually caught when carrying out his fifth murder, which requires him to purchase a gun. However, he is tipped off to the police, who chase him to his warehouse. However, before they catch him, Jack encounters Verge, who takes him to Hell. Back in Hell, Verge has finished recounting his crimes and they have reached the ninth and centre of hell. Jack tries to escape by running to a staircase but instead he falls into the abyss, finally ensuing justice for his actions.

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The House That Jack Built Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The House That Jack Built is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The House That Jack Built

The House That Jack Built study guide contains a biography of director Lars von Trier, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The House That Jack Built
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Essays for The House That Jack Built

The House That Jack Built essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The House That Jack Built, directed by Lars von Trier.

• Recontextualizing Inferno: The Hell of "The House That Jack Built"

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The House That Jack Built

• In five episodes, failed architect and vicious sociopath Jack recounts his elaborately orchestrated murders -- each, as he views them, a towering work of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest.
• USA in the 1970s. We follow the highly intelligent Jack over a span of 12 years and are introduced to the murders that define Jack's development as a serial killer. We experience the story from Jack's point of view, while he postulates that each murder is an artwork in itself. As the inevitable police intervention is drawing nearer, he is taking greater and greater risks in his attempt to create the ultimate artwork. Along the way we experience Jack's descriptions of his personal condition, problems and thoughts through a recurring conversation with the unknown Verge--a grotesque mixture of sophistry mixed with an almost childlike self-pity and psychopathic explanations. The House That Jack Built is a dark and sinister story, yet presented through a philosophical and occasional humorous tale. — Zentropa Entertainments
• Reflecting on his existence, disturbed Jack, a failed architect and sadistic serial killer, drones on about his twelve-year reign of terror to Verge, his unseen, enigmatic companion. To illuminate the significance of his systematic atrocities, Jack recounts five defining, randomly chosen incidents from his busy, blood-spattered life, making sure to include every single detail of his elaborate, revolting murders. But in Jack's eyes, these grisly killings are works of art. What will it take to create his magnum opus and end his brutal career with a bang? — Nick Riganas
• Jack is a quiet, seemingly-harmless architect, working on building his dream house. One day, in a fit of annoyance and anger, he kills a woman to whom he had reluctantly given a lift. He discovers that he enjoys killing, and over the next 12 years he goes on a killing spree. — grantss
• The story follows Jack, a serial killer with some artistic disposition, over the course of twelve years and depicts the murders that develop Jack as a serial killer. Throughout the film he has side conversations with Verge in between the depictions of the incidents, most of these revolve around discussion of philosophy, ethics or Jack's view of the world. 1st Incident Jack (Matt Dillon) is driving down a road when he comes upon a woman (Uma Thurman) who has car trouble. She also needs to fix her broken jack. After some conversation and joking at one point that she shouldn't be in his van because he could very well be a serial killer. Jack agrees to take her to his mechanic, Sonny (Jack McKenzie). He fixes the tire jack, but when they both return to try and fix the car once again, the tire jack breaks. The woman asks to be brought back once again. This time however, Jack takes the tire jack and kills her with it. He then takes her body to an industrial freezer he had purchased to store it away. Jack hid her car in the bushes, where it was actually partly visible from the highway. But the police never investigated as luckily it was right at the border of 2 states and in "no man's land." 2nd Incident Jack knocks on the door of another woman (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) and claims he's a cop who can help her out with her dead husband's pension. Eventually, he finds another angle as the woman is suspicious and says he's actually an insurance agent and can promise her more cash. The woman invites him in, and he strangles her but fails to completely kill her. She wakes up, and he offers her some water with crumbled-up donuts in it, in an attempt to make her choke to death which doesn't work, so he strangles her again and stabs her through her heart. However, his obsessions with trying to clean up every surface in the house nearly leads to his undoing as a suspicious cop (Edward Speleers) comes by. He then ties the woman's body to the back of the car and drags her body all the way to the industrial freezer. This left a trail of blood all through the streets through which Jack drove. Again, he got lucky as it rained that night, washing away the entire trail and evidence. Around this time Jack ends up giving himself the serial killer moniker "Mr. Sophistication." 3rd Incident Jack takes a woman (Sofie Grabol) he is dating and her two sons, Grumpy (Rocco Day) and George (Cohen Day) out for a hunting lesson. Shortly after, he kills both sons using a sniper rifle at a distance and forces the woman to feed pie to George. He eventually ends up killing the woman. He takes the body of Grumpy, her other son, and, using his knowledge of taxidermy, re-arranges his face into a grotesque smile. 4th Incident Jack meets Jacqueline (Riley Keough), a woman that he calls "Simple," as he believes her to be stupid. Jack confesses he has killed sixty people at this point and is the serial killer "Mr. Sophistication," but Jacqueline does not believe him and thinks he's lying. After he asks her for a marker, and proceeds marking red circles around her breasts, she tries to get away and tell a cop, but he dismisses her as a drunk. Eventually, Jacqueline fails to escape, and Jack cuts off her breasts with a knife and murders her. He pins one of the breasts to the Cop's car and fashions the other one into a wallet. 5th Incident Jack has detained six people and tied them to a makeshift post, lining their heads up in a row with the intention of killing them all with one bullet, but he realizes that the bullet he bought from Al (Jeremy Davies) is not a full metal jacket bullet. Al refuses to sell the bullets and instead Jack has to go to the trailer of a man known as S.P (David Bailie). Knowing that the cops are looking for Jack, S.P. points a gun at Jack and thinks that he has caught him. Jack convinces him to drop his gun and kills him with a knife through his throat and then grabs the one bullet he needs. He then puts on S.P.'s red bathrobe and waits for the police to arrive as his van is now stuck in a ditch and he requires transportation. He kills the cop and steals his car, which he leaves outside his freezer space with the siren blazing. He tries to line up the shot but realizes it's too blurry. He finally succeeds in prying open a door at the back of the freezer that's always been stuck shut. He continues to try to line up the shot and sees Verge (Bruno Ganz) for the first time. Verge suggests that Jack has unfinished business and has never really built the house that he was intending to build. Using the bodies as material, Jack constructs a house out of them and when he enters the make-shift house, he sees a hole that leads down. At this point, the cops successfully torch through the door, and Jack decides to go through the hole, following Verge. Epilogue: Katabasis In an allusion to Dante's Inferno, Verge is actually the poet Virgil and is guiding Jack through Hell. At the very bottom of Hell there is a bridge and a vast dark space below. The door on the other side of the bridge leads out of Hell and presumably to Heaven as Verge tells Jack. The bridge is completely broken, but Jack notices that one could climb around the cliff and over to the other side, although Verge tells him that he recommends against it and that this is not where he is to deliver him. Jack ignores him and decides to try to climb over anyway. Jack fails and falls off the cliff down into the fiery abyss below.

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Here's the literally hellish ending to The House That Jack Built explained. Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has a long history of making controversial and intentionally provocative films. Examples include Breaking The Waves , Nymphomaniac and Antichrist . His work tends to greatly polarise critics and audiences and they frequently explore taboo topics and feature scenes of shocking violence.

Case in point would be The House That Jack Built , a 2018 serial killer movie starring Matt Dillon as the title character. Jack is an architect and psychopath who has viciously murdered dozens of people, with the film flashing back to several of his worst crimes. Uma Thurman and Riley Keough play two of Jack's victims, and there's perhaps no better example of the critical divide surrounding Lars von Trier than the movie's Cannes debut. Over a hundred members of the audience are said to have walked out of the screening in disgust, but it was still greeted with a standing ovation when it was finished.

Related: Brawl In Cell Block 99 Ending Explained: It’s Dante’s Inferno

The House That Jack Built isn't just a straightforward serial killer movie though, as the film is told from Jack's recollections as he's being led into Hell itself. The story's structure is based around Dante's Inferno from The Divine Comedy , a poem that came to define the image of Hell as the main character is led through all it's nine levels. Just like Inferno , Jack is led into the abyss by Virgil (Bruno Ganz, The Counselor ), to whom he recounts his many horrific acts.

The House That Jack Built is dripping in subtext and meaning, with the film itself being something of an essay on-screen violence and the role of art by Lars von Trier . That's part of the reason for the film's literal descent into Hell, which is kicked off towards the end when Jack is on the verge of being caught. After planning to kill five people with one bullet, Jack has to open a long-frozen freezer door in his basement to gain enough space for the shot. That's where he meets Ganz's Verge, who is mysteriously hanging out in the freezer and encourages Jack to build a "house" out of the many corpses he's acquired over the years.

Jack then constructs a gruesome house out of the bodies and then follows Verge into a hole at the bottom of the house as police break into his basement and open fire. The House That Jack Built follows the two men on a Dante's Inferno -style trip, with the last scene seeing Verge lead Jack to a broken bridge over the center of Hell itself. Verge led Jack deeper into Hell than the circle he was supposed to end up at. Jack spots a stairway across the bridge that Verge says leads to Heaven, so he decides to chance it and climb across the wall, but soon slips and disappears into the hole as "Hit The Road Jack" plays over the credits.

Next: Ouija: Origin Of Evil's Ending & Post-Credit Scene Explained

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Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built Is a Narcissistic, Ugly Slog

This review originally ran during the Cannes Film Festival.

It takes about an hour for Lars von Trier to make a predator/prey animal metaphor in his serial-killer movie, complete with archival nature-documentary footage and heavy-handed voice-over. According to Jack (Matt Dillon), creatively interpreting William Blake , there are tigers and lambs, and it is in the tiger’s nature to devour the lamb. Jack, of course, sees himself as a tiger — because he is a killer, but also because he likes to think of himself as an artist, burning bright and fearful. The lamb may die, but as he sees it, it has “been bestowed with the gift of living forever in art. And art is divine.” I can’t remember if his simultaneously belabored and banal musings come before or after Jack taxidermies a child he’s gunned down, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. The House That Jack Built is a film that Cannes has been collectively bracing itself for since the news that the festival’s ban on the filmmaker, put in place after he “joked” about “understanding Hitler” at the 2011 edition, had been lifted. Word of the film’s excessive violence only exacerbated that (I heard a rumor that felt like the work of some creative PR, that paramedics and stretchers would be on hand for audience members at the premiere who couldn’t handle it, because Cannes definitely needs more of a Fear Factor vibe). As it turns out, the film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art. In some respects, Lars von Trier seems to only know how to make films about himself anymore; rarely has the work been so hermetic and lifeless.

Matt Dillon plays Jack, a serial killer with out a twist — when a victim of his played by Uma Thurman meets him, one of the first things she tells him is that he … looks like a serial killer. And he does. He has creepy wire-rimmed glasses, drives a windowless red van, and doesn’t blink much. Over the course of the film he tells his story to an unseen listener, in five “randomly selected” incidents that take place over a 12-year period, and not necessarily in sequence. We see him bash in the skull of Thurman’s busybody with a car jack, strangle a widowed woman and drag her bloody body down the road, and shoot down a girlfriend and her two young sons on a “hunting trip,” just to name a few. Throughout this selected playlist of murders, Jack explains his theories about how and why he is driven to kill other humans, going off on tangents that range in subject from Gothic architecture to dessert wines to, of course, the Holocaust.

At one point his guide remarks how disproportionately his victims tend to be women — and women that Jack seems to think are pretty stupid, at that. One of the more unfortunate sequences involves Riley Keough as another girlfriend (how does Jack find these women? We’ll never know) whom Jack has taken to calling “Simple.” Because she’s so dumb, you see. It’s a hateful, ugly sequence that culminates in Jack drawing dotted outlines around each of Simple’s “perfect tits,” for their eventual dismemberment, and letting her even go so far as to scream and go to the police, knowing that nobody in this von Trier–written world will do anything to help her.

There is nothing to be learned in any of this, because von Trier doesn’t really care to think about if or how a viewer might be changed by a film of his, only how he is changed by making it. This is unfortunate, because I’ve been changed by a few von Trier films in my day (last and most significantly 2011’s Melancholia, at whose Cannes press conference he made his now-infamous “I’m a Nazi” comment) . During another diatribe about art’s relationship to our darkest desires, von Trier flashes through scenes from his entire filmography, and I remembered fondly going into those films with my aperture open, even if they didn’t work for me, or did but didn’t age well. With Jack, von Trier is doing so much to repel and keep us at arm’s length that it’s hard to engage with the film with any kind of seriousness, from its sadistic violence to its Divine Comedy finale. You can only tell yourself those mangled children’s corpses are fake so many times before the rest of the film feels fake as well.

Von Trier, for all his redeemable and irredeemable faults, is a singular and talented artist, and there are flashes of technical and rhythmic virtuosity in Jack that I couldn’t help but admire through my grimace. An early scene where Jack, going through a period of OCD, keeps returning to the scene of a crime, imagining blood under every surface he forgot to clean, makes you feel the anxiety of the disorder, the itchy restlessness. Von Trier can be a filmmaker of great empathy when he wants to be, but it’s exhausting to see him unable to think about the artistic process as anything other than a predator/prey dynamic, something which necessarily must hurt others in the process. It hasn’t helped him in the past , and it’s certainly not helping him now.

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The House That Jack Built

Matt Dillon is a serial killer for whom murder is a work of art in the audacious, masterfully provocative new film from renegade visionary Lars von Trier. more

Matt Dillon is a serial killer for whom murder is a work of art i ... More

Starring: Matt Dillon Bruno Ganz Uma Thurman

Director: Lars von Trier

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Matt Dillon is a serial killer for whom murder is a work of art in the audacious, masterfully provocative new film from renegade visionary Lars von Trier.

Starring: Matt Dillon Bruno Ganz Uma Thurman Siobhan Fallon Hogan Sofie Gråbøl

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Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization, so they're expressed instead through our art. I don't agree. I believe Heaven and Hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to Heaven and the body to Hell. — Jack

The House That Jack Built is a 2018 Psychological Horror film directed and written by Lars von Trier , starring Matt Dillon in the titular role as well as Bruno Ganz as Verge in his final film role. The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and was released theatrically on November 29, 2018 in Denmark, with a simultaneous video-on-demand and theatrical release in America on December 6, 2018 as a slightly censored cut; a full uncut version was released in June 2019, and physically in February 2020.

The film provides examples of:

• Appeal to Flattery : Jack manipulates S.P., the old man in the bathrobe, by telling him how he admires his hunting skills.
• Downplayed with first incident. The woman in the segment behaves like an abrasive Jerkass who repeatedly mocks, taunts, and pushes Jack to a Rage Breaking Point , despite the fact that he gave her a ride with no ulterior motives . Despite even Verge admitting that she was "insufferable", he points out that being rude is no reason to murder someone.
• Played straight with Jack himself at the end, as he's sent plummeting into the depths of hell as the result of his own horrific actions and sheer cowardice.
• Author Avatar : Jack himself represents the worst aspects of Lars von Trier , and is meant to be a self-critique on the director's own works, including his attitudes towards violence, sex, and women.
• Ax-Crazy : Fitting for a Serial Killer , Jack, despite his claims of being an "artist", is clearly a violent lunatic who will kill people for the pettiest of reasons.
• Bad "Bad Acting" : Jack lying to get into a victim's house, first claiming he's a police officer, then saying he's an insurance agent when that starts to fall through.
• Bad People Abuse Animals : A scene from Jack's childhood shows him cutting a duckling's leg off with a pair of pliers, just to establish that he was a bad egg right from the beginning.
• Bait-and-Switch Accusation : S.P., the man in the red bathrobe, holds Jack at gunpoint claiming he knows all about his crimes. Turns out he suspects him of Bank Robbery . Jack is happy to go along with that .
• Beard of Evil : Jack steadily grows one over the course of the various incidents, representing his lessening OCD as well as, of course, his increasingly callous and calculated approach to killing.
• Big "SHUT UP!" : The calm Verge eventually gets utterly fed up with Jack's philosophic waxing and self-pitying. Verge: Stop it! You Antichrist! I don't ever recall having escorted so thoroughly depraved person as you , Jack!
• Bittersweet Ending : And an extremely bitter one, at that. Verge is revealed to be the poet Virgil, who's come to take Jack to Hell for his crimes, and Jack has been recounting the incidents to Verge as they explore it together. The two eventually come to a broken bridge overlooking the deepest part of Hell; on the other side is a staircase that Verge implies leads to Heaven, and Jack attempts to reach it by traversing the nearby rock face, despite Verge's warning that no one has ever successfully made it. Sure enough, he loses his grip and plummets into the molten abyss below , where he'll no doubt receive a punishment far worse than whatever was originally intended for him. It doesn't change the fact that Jack has killed over 60 people, but at least his victims finally have justice.
• Black Comedy : Some of the murders have a comedic tone to them (namely, what happened to the nipples of Jacqueline ) or when Jack drags a body across town with his car. Jack's ultimate fate ends up this way too thanks to some deliberate Soundtrack Dissonance .
• Break the Cutie : Poor, poor Jacqueline.
• Breast Attack : Jack slices both of Jacqueline's breasts with a knife, then plops one in a police car windshield and crafts a wallet with the other .
• Boom, Headshot! : How Jack kills one of the children.
• Bowdlerise : To get the movie an R rating in America, a few scenes were trimmed, notably the picnic scene where it doesn't show the bullets going into the kids , the scene with Jacqueline getting her breast cut off is cut just before Jack's knife cuts into her , and the scene where Jack compares art (showing Lars Von Triers' actual filmography) with Nazi imagery and calling both Honest Art. An unrated version was eventually released months after its initial release with these scenes intact.
• Bystander Syndrome : Invoked and discussed by Jack, who incentivizes Jacqueline to scream for help (to no avail) and then rambles about the fact that nobody cares she's in danger.
• Chekhov's Gun : Early on Jack notes about a locked room in the freezer which becomes a plot point towards the end.
• Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb : Jack when trying to pass the chasm in the underworld. It doesn't end well.
• Color Motif : Red for sin. Jack owns a red van and later wears a striking red bathrobe.
• Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are : During the game hunt when Jack is casually whistling while looking for the wounded woman.
• Continuity Cavalcade : A meta version. When Jack starts discussing the depiction of suffering and atrocities in art, as he ponders that it might be a way for people to express things in fiction that civilization prevents them from doing in real life, a series of clips of particularly gristly moments from Von Trier's previous works plays, namely The Element of Crime , Medea , Riget , Breaking the Waves , Dogville , Antichrist , Melancholia , and Nymphomaniac .
• Cop Killer : Jack's last victim is a cop who tries to arrest him.
• Creepy Souvenir : Jack made a wallet out of a female victim's cut-off breast.
• Creepy Stalker Van : Jack owns one. Lampshaded by his first victim who notes that the van is the kind one might expect to be kidnapped in.
• Dead Guy Puppet : After the third incident, Jack fashions Grumpy's corpse into forever smiling on instead. The smile on the corpse is not pleasant to look at .
• Deadpan Snarker : A lot of the commentary Verge delivers on Jack's stories and asides is quite dry and sarcastic. He spends a good chunk of time subtly mocking Jack and his overinflated sense of self-importance. Jack: Do you know Blake's poems? ...About the lamb and the tiger? Verge: I do know Blake superficially. (sighs forebodingly) ...But I'm afraid I won't escape a comprehensive tutorial.
• Death of a Child : Jack murders two children in the film without remorse.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype : Of the Diabolical Mastermind -type serial killer, a la Hannibal Lecter . Though Jack presents himself as Wicked Cultured and thinks of himself as an artist, he's otherwise a failure in every other endeavor, having to start over on trying to build a house for himself twice. The pretentious Hannibal Lectures he tries to give are constantly and effectively shut down by Verge, who he either ignores or feebly refutes. He's also just not very efficient when it comes to killing, breaking down during his murders and leaving plenty of evidence behind, and he only gets away with it because the police are incompetent or lazy , or through sheer dumb luck, like when it rains after he leaves a long blood trail from dragging one of his victims along a country road. This is very much Truth in Television for many real-life serial killers.
• Deconstruction : To Von Trier's own movies . It's easy to see Jack as a stand-in for Lars, with his pseudo-philosophical and pessimistic diatribes, and his attempts at coming off as an artist but in reality being nothing more than a pretentious, woman-hating, edgelord nihilist whose points are successfully countered by Verge, representing the audience and/or the critics of his films. Ultimately, Jack put little effort into any effective rebuttal except continuing to be increasingly pretentious in his depravity and coming up with excuses for doing so.
• Jack takes to demean Jacqueline for being what he considers a Dumb Blonde by referring to her with the derisive nickname "Simple".
• Verge, enraged by Jack's inhumanity, calls him an "antichrist".
• Deus ex Machina : After leaving a giant blood trail of his second victim, Jack is clearly troubled by what to do till it all of a sudden rains and cleans the blood trail. His conclusion is that God might just be on his side.
• Dirty Coward : Jack primarily goes after people who are weaker than him and lives in constant fear of being apprehended. When finally sent to Hell for his crimes, he risks his soul to try and escape his punishment.
• Disney Villain Death : While trying to scale a wall to reach a staircase leading out of Hell, Jack falls off and into the stream of lava below .
• Distracting Disambiguation : When Jack announces to attempt a One-Hit Polykill with a full metal jacket, the last victim he brought in, a soldier, corrects him by noting that the bullet he is holding up is not actually a full metal jacket. Much to his annoyance, Jack realizes that the guy is right.
• Domestic Abuse : The fourth incident sees Jack in a toxic relationship with a woman named Jacqueline, who he verbally and psychologically abuses on a routine basis. He even goes out of his way to nickname her "Simple" to insult her intelligence.
• Everyone Has Standards : When Jack starts rambling, claiming that he does art and compares his "work" to other, according to him, "artists" (genocidal dictators such as Hitler and Stalin), Verge, who likely escorted all sorts of scum to Hell, gets audibly angry and tells Jack that he's one of the most depraved human beings he ever met.
• Evil Is Petty : Jack will murder people for minor slights such as being rude to him, or simply being a woman .
• Evil Sounds Deep : Jack is monstrous to the core and has Matt Dillon's deep baritone voice.
• Faux Affably Evil : Jack of course, especially during the last incident where he calls his 6 victims "gentlemen" while casually discussing his experiment. However, the affable facade drops rather quickly if things don't go according to his desire.
• For the Evulz : Although Verge tries to give an explanation for some of Jack's murders (a childish desire to be caught, glory and fame), it seems that Jack simply does what he does because he likes it . In the last incident, he tells us about how he kidnapped 6 men to see if (inspired by the Nazis on the eastern front) a full metal jacket bullet could go through 6 skulls at once.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul : Jack, a remorseless serial killer who often wears glasses.
• Framing the Guilty Party : Jack gets accused of Bank Robbery which puts the police on his tail for the real crimes.
• Genius Ditz : Though he's obviously very intelligent and knowledgeable, Jack often bumbles his way through his murders. Some of it has to do with his OCD, but he also makes a ton of fuck-ups that nearly get him caught.
• Gorn : The second incident becomes this, thanks to the comically long blood trail left behind as he was dragging the victim along with his car.
• Gory Discretion Shot : Downplayed. When Jack slices into Jacqueline's breast with a knife, the first few seconds of his attack are shown on-screen, before the camera mercifully cuts away to the outside of the apartment building. Arguably, it makes the whole scene even more disturbing. It also doubles a downplayed Scream Discretion Shot , as Jacqueline starts screaming loudly in pain, despite being gagged, and her scream ends also being somewhat muffled by the camera cutting away.
• Hannibal Lecture : Jack likes to give those, whether to justify that life is nothing but a shithole or to explain how people's deaths are necessary to create a work of art. Verge disagrees.
• Hate Sink : Jack . The whole point of the movie is to show just how much of an irredeemable, sadistic and subhuman scumbag he is. He has zero redeeming qualities and he doesn't even have a sympathetic excuse behind why he murders and tortures people. There is literally nothing to like or sympathize about in him.
• He-Man Woman Hater : Jack appears to prefer female victims, and most of his recollections portray them as gullible and easily manipulated. Verge calls him out on this, and Jack feebly defends himself by saying that he's killed men as well.
• Hero Antagonist : By initially holding Jack at gunpoint to turn him over to the police, S.P. came to be the closest the film has for Jack before Jack manipulated him to put it down before knifing him. Verge however is definitely this, when it's revealed he came for Jack to ferry him to Hell for his sins . The black military veteran as well manages to delay Jack by noting that the bullets he got aren't actually full metal jackets, thus sparing them as he goes off for some, by which time the police arrive.
• Hypocritical Humor : A rather dark example. Jack complains to Jacqueline about how men are perceived as bad by women and society at large. This, mind you, is while he is holding her at knifepoint after previously confessing that he's killed 60 people.
• I Just Want to Be Special : Verge accuses Jack of this, saying that he's just a depraved monster who wants to be seen as someone unique.
• Impersonating an Officer : Jack attempts this at one point and does such a decidedly horrible job at it that he backpedals and says he's actually an insurance agent.
• Jack , aside from being a Serial Killer , is also just an insufferable, pretentious, and misogynistic asshole that practically nobody can stand to be around.
• The woman in the first incident, who is unnecessarily rude and demeaning towards Jack after he gives her a free ride to a mechanic.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk : In the first incident, Jack is presented as a gruff, antisocial man, who nonetheless gives a woman a ride to a mechanic for no personal gain. He ends the segment by murdering her.
• Jitter Cam : A trademark of the director. The handheld camera style adds to the film's realism.
• Karma Houdini : Ultimately averted: attempting to escape Hell, Jack suffers a fate worse than the one he was supposed to receive in the Underworld .
• Karmic Death : Jack not only dies in his own freezer, but ends up falling into the ninth circle of Hell while trying to make an escape .
• In the third incident, Jack murders two children and forces their mother to sit down on a picnic blanket and "feed" their corpses.
• His treatment of Jacqueline throughout the fourth incident is just psychologically cruel and demeaning, seemingly just because he enjoys being having a verbal punching bag.
• Leitmotif : David Bowie 's " Fame " is used as one for Jack, frequently playing when he collects newspaper clippings of his crimes or admires his growing collection of human corpses.
• Literary Allusion Title : The work takes its title from an old nursery rhyme.
• Mad Artist : Jack's view of art is... postmodern, to say the least. In his discussions with Verge, Jack outlines his philosophies about the value of decay in classical art as well as artisanal fields such as wine-making to justify his monstrous actions. Most tellingly, Jack lectures Verge on the iconic value of the German Stuka dive-bomber planes from WWII and expresses great admiration for the Nazis' atrocities (plus Communists') since in his view destruction is the greatest art, with it being a kind of creation itself. So they were the greatest artists who ever lived. This is the last straw that enrages Verge enough to cement Jack as the worst person he had ever ferried .
• Mask of Sanity : Jack at one point admits to Verge that he probably is a psychopath, noting that he never really felt or understood the concept of empathy, and he had to spend a lot of time learning how to fake it in order to better fit in with normal society. As he explains this, a montage of Jack practising various facial expressions in a mirror plays.
• Narcissist : Jack is a clear example. Being an engineer, he desperately wanted to be an architect and fancies himself as an artist. Verge even calls him one.
• Neat Freak : Jack is obsessed with cleanliness, to the point where Verge strongly suspects that he has some kind of OCD. In the second incident, he has severe problems making his escape from his crime scene, because he has several intrusive thoughts about investigators possibly finding any blood splatters he might have left behind, so he sticks around and cleans the place several times over.
• Nightmare Face : Grumpy, after Jack gets done performing surgery on his face to create a Slasher Smile .
• Nightmare Fetishist : Jack considers genocidal dictators and mass murderers to be examples of great "artists", much to Verge's disgust.
• Obfuscating Disability : Jack uses crutches to make himself look harmless.
• One-Hit Polykill : Jack attempts this with his rifle and six victims in the freezer, but he never gets around to finishing the experiment .
• Onscreen Chapter Titles : A trademark of von Trier. The movie is separated into chapters which are introduced with on-screen title cards.
• Pet the Dog : The first incident sees Jack give a woman who is stranded on the side of the road a free ride to a mechanic. Subverted by the end when he bashes her skull in, and he only gets worse from there.
• Police Are Useless : Played straight and even acknowledged in the movie. There are a few points in the films where the police could have maybe caught Jack but completely screwed up. In one scenario the cop could have saved a victim of Jack's if he had taken her seriously. They catch up with him only after someone else identifies Jack as the serial killer, and then he steals a cop car, which is left (siren blaring) right outside where his intended victims are held.
• Psychopathic Manchild : Verge speculates this to be the case with Jack. He's not far off. Jack has a rather childish mentality wrapped up in supposed depth and intelligence and has tantrums when things don't go his way. Jack: For example, hide and seek. In the case of hide I always chose to run in near panic into a field of reeds to hide. Verge: I see something other than a scared kid. I see a kid with a more mysterious goal. The choice of the dash through the reeds was an escape but also an open invitation to the pursuer because of the clear path of broken reeds left behind. Was there an element of "come and catch me" in you as a child? Or perhaps, more importantly in you as a person?
• The first incident shows Jack being repeatedly insulted and mocked by a woman for no apparent reason after he helps her out. After one too many jabs, Jack bashes her skull in with a tire jack.
• Verge, fed up with Jack's delusions of grandeur, tears into him by calling him an "antichrist" and saying that he is one of the worst human beings he's ever had to escort .
• Refuge in Audacity : Jack gets away with many of his crimes because he commits them in plain sight without any hang-ups.
• Sadist : Jack. He's a Serial Killer who views his murders as "art" and takes great pleasure in performing his work.
• Sarcastic Confession : Jack openly admits to a cop that he is a serial killer and that he has killed 60 people, a number so ridiculously high that the cop ignores the statement.
• Self-Applied Nickname : Jack takes to calling himself "Mr. Sophistication," and even writes several anonymous letters to the media with this moniker. Verge: "Mr. Sophistication"? Of course. Your narcissism knows no bounds.
• Self-Deprecation : Many discussions for the film, both positively and negatively, have remarked on how much of a self-critique the film is for von Trier, with Jack himself being a stand-in for the director and Verge representing the audience/critics who detest the cruelty he's shown in his work. Given how much Jack is shown to be a sociopathic narcissist who torments women with major delusions of grandeur all for the sake of his "art", this trope is in full effect here, and it's not helped by Verge name-dropping one of von Trier's films .
• Serial Killer : Jack at the point where he had met Jacqueline, had apparently killed 60 people. It quickly turned to 61.
• Jack pretends to be injured to earn Jacqueline's pity recalls Ted Bundy doing the same thing with some of his victims, and in the same incident, the police officer not believing her when she tries to tell him that Jack is a serial killer is likely one to one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims nearly escaping only to be returned to him because of the officer's incompetence.
• Several times throughout the movie, there is a shot of Jack in front of his red van parked in an alleyway in the storage area where his storage freezer is, showing him holding white cards with black text written on them which he would drop the facing card for another one with another bit of text as he discusses a topic. This is a callback to the music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan , which features Dylan holding cards with the lyrics for the song which he would drop in time to his singing voiceover. The setting in the music video is also an alleyway in a warehouse area.
• Shut Up, Hannibal! : Verge calls Jack out on his nihilistic and rather pretentious and self-pitying worldview several times, but to no avail.
• Signature Move : Downplayed. Jack uses several different methods to kill people over the course of the film, but that said, he does appear to get somewhat of a special kick out of strangling people to death with his bare hands.
• Single Tear : Jack sheds one when watching the scythe scene in the Elysian Fields. Most likely, he's mourning the loss of the single moment of peace he knew in his life, knowing he would never experience it again, but promptly stops when he recalls his grisly crimes.
• Small Name, Big Ego : Jack likes to think of himself as a peerless, misunderstood artist whose work will be remembered throughout the centuries, but it's obvious both to Verge and the audience that he is nothing more than a sadistic monster with very little artistic talent to speak of.
• Smug Snake : Despite presenting as The Evil Genius , Jack is ultimately a pathetic loser who's failed in almost every regard in his life, and can't even put up a good front when he's trying to worm his way into a victim's house. Though through the years, he learns from experience, he proves time and time again that just because he's intelligent doesn't mean he can't also be Stupid Evil .
• The Social Darwinist : Jack's philosophy as expressed is partly something like this. He notes destruction is natural (comparing people with tigers and sheep with him being in the former) and thus dislikes religion for trying to hold back people's "inner tiger", wanting strong people to let loose to destroy the weak. Jack's wish would be for humans to grow more into tigers rather than sheep. He discusses The Lamb and The Tyger poems by William Blake on this theme (his favorite being of course the latter). Verge is disgusted by this, calling him an Antichrist.
• The Sociopath : Lampshaded by Verge, who calls Jack a psychopath; the symptoms are even shown onscreen.
• Stock Footage : Quite a bit, usually of what consists of Glenn Gould playing on the piano, videos of cathedrals, hunting footage, Nazi propaganda and even select clips of von Trier's own filmography (which includes everything from his first film to Nymphomaniac ).
• Stuka Scream : Jack admires engineering feat.
• Stupid Evil : A lot of Jack's failures as a serial killer come from him trying to make his murders into works of art. By the end, he leaves a trail of bodies behind and has an outburst at the gun store owner for giving him the wrong bullet, which leads the police directly to him. He only gets away because Verge escorted him to Hell.
• Surrounded by Idiots : Jack certainly thinks as such, especially when said idiots are women. In reality, this trope is discussed and deconstructed by Verge. Jack certainly likes to think of himself as a Diabolical Mastermind who gets away with his crimes because he's intelligent, but in all likelihood, he's an Unreliable Narrator who's just painting everyone around him as stupid or lazy to accentuate his own supposed brilliance, when in reality, he's prone to plenty of fuck-ups and only gets away either because he got lucky or due to the authorities being incompetent .
• Tempting Fate : The woman in the first incident drags on and on in detail about how she thinks Jack might be a serial killer and how easy it would be for him to kill her and hide her body, and starts poking the bear even harder by calling him a wimp . It ends exactly how you'd expect it to.
• Title Drop : Verge's line "Wasn't Jack going to build a house?"
• How Jack views his victims. Verge argues that he intentionally picks out these kinds of people or makes them look dumber in his recollections than they actually are .
• The police officer who arrives at Jack's neighbor's house and just assumed that the neighbor had killed Jack without having seen his face and then lowers his gun before confirming that certainly fits the trope.
• Jack himself, really. His murders are sloppy with no real preparation or forethought, which eventually leads the police right to him. At the end, he tries to climb along the extremely narrow rock face in Hell to get to reach a staircase leading out, and he predictably falls into the cascading lava below.
• The young boy who runs from cover into the open field, thus creating an easy target for Jack.
• The Unfair Sex : Jack rants about the unfairness of his condition as a male to Jacqueline, saying that everyone is always quick to blame men, even if they have done nothing wrong. Its effectiveness is slightly undercut by the fact that Jack is much very guilty of several horrid crimes, has restrained and gagged her, and has made it clear that he is going to kill her, however.
• Unreliable Narrator : Verge at one point implicitly accuses Jack of being this, calling him out on how his accounts all seem to portray his victims as unintelligent and himself as smart, suggesting that he is altering the details of what really happened to make his murders appear more justified, if nothing else, then at least to himself. He also notices that all the stories Jack tells him is about him murdering women, asking him if he is trying to portray himself as being superior to women, to which Jack feebly tries to protest that he has also killed plenty of men and is just choosing the stories he tells at random, claiming that it is just a coincidence that they all happen to be about women.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom : The woman in the first incident, who keeps egging Jack on and pressing his buttons until he finally snaps. She becomes his first victim and ends up setting Jack down a very dark path.
• Villain Protagonist : To say that Jack is one of these is putting it lightly.
• Villain Respect : Jack is consistently polite to Verge and seems to enjoy their conversations, even bidding farewell to him with a handshake. However, this mostly comes from him idolizing Verge (aka Virgil ) as an artist, rather than respecting him as an actual person.
• Waxing Lyrical : As he walks with Verge, Jack complains that he has a sour taste in his mouth. Verge dryly asks him "You want me to show you the way to the next whiskey bar ?"
• Wicked Cultured : Jack believes he's this, having an affinity for Glenn Gould, Roman/Greek/German architecture, and famous pieces of literature from such authors as William Blake. However, in reality, he's closer to Wicked Pretentious , coming across to Verge like he's trying to impress him.
• Would Hit a Girl : Most of Jack's victims are women, with Verge suggesting he's a misogynist. He weakly denies it, saying he's killed men as well.
• Would Hurt a Child : Jack kills a mother and her two young children in a twisted game hunt . Jack goes to the hunting tower, while the mother tries to hide the children behind cover. One of them runs off and is shot twice, very brutally, then the other kid gets shot in the head.
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The House That Jack Built Review

10 Dec 2018

The House That Jack Built

Whether filming self-administered clitorectomies or unsimulated sex, or expressing Nazi sympathy at press conferences, Lars von Trier loves to cause headlines. He sends controversy before his films like a leering herald. Shock is one of his tools and when used well it can harshly underline his films’ message. When used needlessly it just looks childish. The House That Jack Built is seeping with horrible moments — a breast sliced off; a taxidermied child; a mutilated duckling; the casual hunting of a family — all in service of a lumpen point that is being made better in many other places. His gruesome instincts are not underlining his intent but scribbling over it.

The film opens in pitch darkness. Jack ( Matt Dillon ) and an unidentified man ( Bruno Ganz ) are conversing in a way that indicates Jack is being led to some sort of afterlife and reflecting on his existence. He tells his companion about the murders he has committed, illuminating five randomly chosen ‘incidents’ (some have single victims, others multiple). They range from the bludgeoning of an annoying woman ( Uma Thurman ) seeking help with a broken car, to a picnic/hunting lesson that ends with a woman numbly trying to feed her child pie as his brain leaks out of the back of his head, to a casual date with Jacqueline ( Riley Keogh ) that ends with the aforementioned breast removal as she screams to a world that’s not listening. Jack discusses all these incidents as his art, his statement on a society beneath him. The joke is that Jack is a banal man who offers the world nothing. He is a trained architect but attempts to build his own house are stymied by his limited vision. In a very darkly comic sequence, Jack’s OCD forbids him to leave a crime scene before repeatedly checking every surface for blood. He gives himself the murder-moniker Mr Sophistication. Yet he achieves his goal of notoriety. Narcissism trumps talent.

Von Trier’s message is clear: a nihilistic statement on the mess of our world and specifically America, and the ascent of men who believe declaring yourself the best means you are, with no burden of proof. Jack has Trump-ish vocal and physical tics when delivering his lies; the hunted family wear MAGA-y red caps. The metaphor doesn’t need further explanation, but von Trier jams in a clumsy soliloquy in which Jack moans that the white man is always the bad guy, as he stabs a bound woman.

“The world is fucked” is a message you can read in countless places — von Trier is joining the discussion, but all his lurid, gory presentation can’t disguise that he has little to add. He even seems bored by himself, at one point illustrating a damning rant with a montage of older, better von Trier films. Upsetting scenes might make you look away, but there’s not much else to see here.

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Jack (The House That Jack Built)

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Jack , also known as Mr. Sophistication , is the titular protagonist of the 2018 psychological horror/thriller art film The House That Jack Built .

He is a narcissistic serial killer who views his numerous and gruesome murders as a form of art, and in turn, sees himself as a masterful artist. After his death, he is led through the circles of Hell by a guide named Verge, to whom he describes five "incidents" throughout his life.

He was portrayed by Matt Dillon , who also played Jonathan Corliss in A Kiss Before Dying , Patrick Healy in There's Something About Mary , Sam Lombardo in Wild Things , John Ryan in Crash , and Trip Murphy in Herbie: Fully Loaded .

• 1 Biography
• 2 Personality
• 5 External Links

Biography [ ]

The film follows the twelve years in the late '70s-80s that Jack was active as a serial killer through 5 "incidents." In the first incident, Jack meets a woman who needed to fix her broken jack for her car. After commenting that she initially thought that Jack was a serial killer, Jack ponders over her words. When she takes her to the car repairman and gets her tire jack fixed, it gets broken once again, but this time, Jack murders her. From there, Jack began to refer to himself as Mr. Sophistication.

His next target is a widow. He convinces her that he represented her deceased husband and could help her with his pension. The widow takes her offer and lets him in. He then tries to strangle her to death in a sloppy manner, but when that failed, he gives her a stale doughnut and water as a means of making her asphyxiate. When that doesn't work, he then stabs her in the heart. Cleaning up the room, Jack is nearly caught by a police officer alerted to the disturbance, but manages to escape. He then places her body in the industrial freezer.

Sometime later, Jack met a single mother and started to date her. One day, he suggests that they go hunting. Jack's true intentions become apparent when he executes her sons Grumpy and George and forces his girlfriend to partake in a twisted picnic before forcing her to walk into a field and shooting her. Jack then decides to stitch a crude smile across Grumpy's face and assembles their bodies into an art piece.

Jack begins dating another woman named Jacqueline. He treats her with contempt, mocking her intelligence and calling her "simple". During a drunken argument, Jack tells her that he has murdered 60 people. She tries to tell a passing police officer what Jack has done, but he thinks she is simply drunk. Jack feigns remorse for abusing her and begs her forgiveness, which she grants, and takes him back to her apartment. While Jack sleeps off his drunk, she finds that he has cut her phone line and does indeed intend to kill her. Jack strangles her when she tries to scream for help, and slices off one of her breasts and places it on the back of the police officer's car. He makes the remaining breast into a wallet.

Jack's killing spree comes to an end when he kidnaps five men and tries to kill them all with one bullet. However, upon seeing that the bullet wasn't a full metal jacket, Jack heads to the store to buy the right brand. His friend S. P. attempts to hold him at gunpoint after alerting the police, but Jack tries to appeal to their friendship, taking it as the opportunity to kill him when S.P. lets his guard down. Jack then murders a cop before meeting Verge , implied to be the spirit of the poet Virgil . He reminds Jack that he never finished his house, leaving Jack to construct a morbid one out of his victims' corpses.

Following Verge through Hell, Jack tries to justify his actions as being for the sake of art only for Verge to deride him for his delusions of grandeur. He shows Jack that his bridge had burned down years ago, leaving only the pit to Hell below with the way on the other side leading to Heaven, thus making it apparent that Jack would be condemned to eternal damnation for his crimes and he could not possibly escape. A scared and confused Jack ignores Verge and attempts to climb away from the pit to the other side to escape hell and go to Heaven. However, he loses his grip and tumbles into the flames below, falling into Hell for all eternity as Verge silently watches.

Personality [ ]

Jack is the personification of evil. Jack views murder as art and takes sadistic pleasure in killing people, inflicting pain, and torturing his victims before killing them. Jack enjoys killing children, men, and women. During one of his earlier kills, he mentioned that he had killed 66 people and then went on to torture and murder his "girlfriend", so by the end of the film, Jack had killed at least 67 people.

Like any other psychopath, Jack has no conscience, empathy, or remorse. This can be seen when Jack, as a child, casually mutilates a baby duckling and leaves it to drown.

Jack has no understanding or capability of emotions or how people feel them. He practices making faces in the mirror to try and mimic the emotions of other people, but when actually in a situation where he should feel them naturally, he has no ability to do so. This can be seen when he mocks the mother of the two children he had just brutally killed and proceeds to force her to engage with their corpses.

Jack claims that he views his murders as art. He goes into detail and demonstrated that the murders he committed were the only things that brought him any real pleasure. Like a true sadistic psychopath, Jack has no qualms torturing, mutilating, or killing in some of the cruelest ways possible.

Jack seems to revel in his status as a serial killer and is fully aware of how horrible his actions are, and yet, this only makes it more pleasurable for him. Jack even goes as far as to call Nazis idols, and then compares himself to them, calling himself an idol and a unique serial killer.

Jack feels no remorse for his crimes, and in his final moments on Earth, he builds a "house" out of many of the corpses (which he more than likely did not truly build as the cops would have descended on him before he could) which he had stored from his murders. When Jack is being escorted through Hell by Virgil, Virgil claims that Jack is the most depraved and horrible soul that he has ever encountered, even going as far as to call Jack an Antichrist.

Finally, Jack gets what is coming to him when he falls into the deepest and darkest depths of Hell when trying to escape his punishment by scaling Hell's walls to get away to Heaven.

Gallery [ ]

• Dillon based his performance as Jack in part upon the late real-life serial killer Ted Bundy .
• Jack suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was the reason he kept going back into Claire's house to clean imagined blood that wasn't there for fear of being caught.

External Links [ ]

• Jack on the Pure Evil Wiki
• 1 Twelve Demon Moons
• 2 The Boiled One

The House That Jack Built: Ending Explained

The House That Jack Built is a disturbing story a psychopath who narrates five random murders that he had committed over a period of 12 years. The film stars Matt Dillon in the lead role and a whole bunch of guest stars including Uma Thurman. It’s directed by Lars von Trier whose prior films include the Nymphomaniac movies and Melancholia . The film has a run-time of close to two and a half hours, so you’re going to have to be patient. While most of the film is pretty straight forward, the climax becomes eccentric and needs some explaining. So here’s the plot and ending of the movie The House That Jack Built; spoilers ahead.

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The House That Jack Built: Plot Synopsis

While it is disclosed only in the end, Jack is narrating his five random murders to someone by the name Verge, who we’ll talk about later. Let’s quickly go over the killings. Oh, it would be a good time as ever to know that Jack owns a walk-in freezer which has one compartment frozen shut. Oh and that Jack has OCD. Oh and that he’s been trying to build his perfect house but can’t because of his OCD.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, is a medical condition; it’s an anxiety disorder that causes excessive thoughts that lead to repetitive behaviors. OCD, unfortunately, used casually to indicate a person is meticulous or organized. That is far from the truth. Find out more about obsession and compulsion here .

Murder One: Woman on the road

A lady (Uma) happens to ask Jack for help because her car’s broken down. Jack unwillingly agrees. The lady turns out to be a little pushy and jokes about how Jack could be a serial killer. When she happens to sufficiently piss him off, he bashes her skull in with the car jack that they’re trying to repair. After that, he transports her inside his freezer.

Murder Two: Woman in the house

Jack tricks an older woman into believing that he’s an insurance agent and can get her pension amount increased. She’s initially suspicious but eventually buys what he’s saying when he mentions money. Jack does a lousy job of choking her to death but gets there finally. As he tries to leave with her body, his OCD with being spick and span makes him visualize blood stains he’s left behind. This delays his exit, and a nearby cop shows up to investigate. Guessing that the police is going to make him open his trunk, he removes the dead body and puts it in the shrubs. Jack finally drives away dragging the body. Shabbily. All along the road. Leaving a long trail of face-blood right up to his cold storage. But then the great rains come and wash away the blood.

Murder Three: Woman and her kids

Honestly, this was a tough one to watch. Jack kills this woman’s two kids. Then he makes her feed the dead kids some pie, after that, shoots her down. He takes the bodies back but decides that he’s going to remodel the younger kid (Grumpy) to put a smile on his face. The stuff of nightmares.

Murder Four: Simple Woman

Jack has met a naive woman and is feeding her information about him being a psycho. She doesn’t believe him. Eventually, she gets creeped out and heads down. Ironically, they meet a cop, and Jack confesses to killing people. The policeman dismisses it to be a drunk couple’s fight. The lady seems stupid enough to take Jack back up where he finally kills her and cuts off her breasts. He finds the cop’s car and leaves one of her breasts on his windshield. And the other one, he makes himself a breast pocket purse.

Murder Five: Multi Head-Shot

Okay, so, this one is not a murder. It’s only an attempt. Jack has selected a bunch of random guys and aligned them to do an experiment. He wants to use a full metal jacket to see if he can kill all of them with one shot. Jack has the wrong bullet and goes to get that changed. In that process, Jack kills S.P, a person known to him, who believes he is a robber. Then Jack kills the cop who S.P has notified and steals his car. Once he gets back with the right bullet, he realizes that the gun is too close and he can’t focus. So Jack decides to move the gun behind, into that room that’s frozen shut. He manages to finally pry it open and place the gun. The cop car outside still has its siren blowing, and that attracts the attention of another cop who cuts into the freezer and fires a shot.

Let’s stop here because this is where all the bizarre elements of the film kick in, leading up to the credits, and you go “wait, what?”.

Who is Verge? What was The House That Jack Built about?

So let’s get the obvious out of the way – Verge is short for Publius Vergilius Maro, a.k.a Vergil, the poet who takes Dante through Hell. Right, so, we have a Dante’s Inferno allusion where a Verge is taking Jack through hell. But why? Why would Jack be in hell if he never died? This is where I prefer to think that Jack did die. We stopped going through the plot soon as the cop fired into the freezer.

Significance of that locked room inside the freezer

I believe that the room that is frozen shut is metaphorical in nature. That it is a part of Jack’s mind that is locked away. Inside this portion of his mind resides his conscience. He sees his conscience in the form of Verge. So why is Jack suddenly able to access this room (part of his mind) and able to talk to his conscience? Well, I’m going to go on a limb and say that shot the cop fired… hit Jack. And as Jack begins dying, he is able to access the area of the locked up mind and his conscience. Everything that we are shown – Jack physically meeting Verge, rapidly constructing the house of corpses, jumping through the hole in the ground, and the chaos that follows … is all happening inside Jack’s dying mind.

Jack’s Confession

Jack is confessing his murders to his conscience (the confession conversation we have heard throughout the film). While his conscience, Verge, objects to what Jack is saying “Stop it…you Antichrist! I don’t recall ever having escorted a so thoroughly depraved person as you”, Jack seems to consider death to be artistic (and hence the comparison to the pianist). Jack’s conscience metaphorically takes him through the circles of hell. Through this journey, Jack witnesses a sight of a meadow with men working with scythes. This represents the place of innocence, and peace that he used to feel, as a child, watching the men working the meadows. Jack sheds a tear as he remembers his victims – perhaps the closest Jack will get to repentance.

The Broken Bridge in The House That Jack Built

Finally, they reach the broken bridge. The other side of the bridge leads to Heaven, but Verge tells Jack that it’s not where he’s meant to go. Jack doesn’t care, he wants to climb all the way around and tries to, but falls into the abyss. Effectively, Jack dies, and in his fading mind, he witnesses himself falling into the inferno, into hell. His conscience doesn’t allow him to be acquitted of his crimes.

The House That Jack Built: An Alternate Theory

There is one final thought, and it is along the lines of American Psycho. No matter the crime, nobody seems to notice Jack going about doing it. Be it dragging bodies, carrying them around, or confessing. The circumstances always favour Jack allowing him to get away, no matter how sloppy he gets. This could point to a theory that he’s actually not committing any murders. He only imagines them and progressively gets crazier and, possibly, freezes to death alone inside his cold storage.

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The House That Jack Built

The House That Jack Built from provocateur Lars von Trier is a dreadfully self-reflective film about a violent serial killer played by Matt Dillion in a career defining performance. Framed with scholarly discussions about art and violence the film walks a fine line between interesting and utterly disgusting. Scream Factory’s 2 Disc Blu-ray set is impressive with an outstanding A/V presentation and enough bonus features for fans of the film. This is a tough feature to stomach so I can only recommend it For Fans Only.  

Boundary-pushing cinematic visionary Lars von Trier (Antichrist) returns with one of his most daring, masterfully provocative works yet. In five audacious episodes, failed architect and arch-sociopath Jack (Matt Dillon) recounts the elaborately orchestrated murders — each, as he views them, as a towering work of art — that define his "career" as a serial killer. Mixing pitch-black humor, transcendent surrealism, and renegade musings on everything from history to architecture to cinema itself, von Trier fashions a radical, blazingly personal inquiry into violence, art, and the twin acts of creation and destruction. Uma Thurman, Riley Keough, and Bruno Ganz co-star.

Storyline: Our Reviewer's Take

“Do you have a favorite number?”

You know that moment after trying something new for dinner you look around the table to see how everyone else is going to respond? It’s the pause before collectively agreeing on whether or not the tuna casserole tastes awful. That’s the feeling you get after sitting through The House That Jack Built . Is this good ? Did I like it? This is one of von Trier’s goals with this sadistic yet deeply personal film. He throws in layer after layer hoping to push you farther away while wrestling with his own demons through the killer’s cycle of violence. It’s exhausting at times. Thankfully you don’t have to wrestle with your thoughts about a casserole for over 2 hours. 

The House That Jack Built follows OCD engineer Jack over the course of 12 years with 5 separate events detailing his rise as a serial killer in the 70’s/early 80’s. Framing each of the five “incidents” is a narrated scholarly discussion between Jack and an unknown person named Verge. The two discuss the intersection of violence and art in which Jack postulates that his murders (and other great atrocities) are works of art. As Jack grows as a killer so does his confidence which leads to greater risks in pursuing his art. By the end Verge has led Jack from his humble beginnings of exploring art in violence to the literal depths of Hell. 

Jack’s “incidents” begin with a rather mundane horror cliche in which he picks up a woman (Uma Thurman) stranded by the side of the road. He takes her to a repair shop to call for help but she never makes it home safely. Her condescending friendliness ends with “You’re way too much of a wimp to murder someone”. From here Jack’s confidence rises as he stalks and kills a widower (von Trier regular Siobhan Fallon Hogan), murders a family during a hunting trip while sporting red baseball hats (solidifying von Trier’s political views), dismembers a girlfriend, then finally in his fifth incident Jack creates his masterpiece.  

Broadly interpreting William Blake’s poems “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” Jack sees himself as the proverbial killer tiger creating art from the death of the lambs. Verge calls him out on the position of violence as art. “Don’t look at the acts. Look at the works, the whole notion of trophies” Jack retorts. Here Jack and Verge detail art within destruction and decomposition versus creation and love for art’s sake. Jack explains that frequently it is the icon that brings real artistic value to the world whether they be the mass murderers of the world or the engineers who put sirens on the Stuka dive bomber airplane. “Heaven and Hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell.” The soul is the reason, and the body is all the dangerous things, for example, art and icons.” Surprisingly, these tangents never feel out of place within the story. Jack is a methodical and educated killer who cannot help but obsess over the details of everything from the cleanliness of his victim’s home to the beauty of Genn Gould’s musicality. 

Matt Dillion is exceptional here providing a career defining performance in a role that is magnetic and yet repulsive. Here Dillon isn’t tasked with a singular stock character out for blood, but rather a highly motivated killer bumbling through the growing pains of finding meaning through his “Art”. The actor’s range here is astounding. The supporting cast of Uma Thurman, Bruno Ganz, Siobhan Hogan, and Riley Keough provide memorable performances as well. I find it playfully ironic that the angel from Wings of Desire is now escorting a serial killer to the depths of Hell. 

The House That Jack Built makes a difficult case for separating art from the artist. Here von Trier reflects on his past and inner demons through the lens of a serial killer’s philosophical tangents and deep existential questions that contemplate the value of a lifetime’s work and the creation of Art. Reading into these themes too deeply can sully the film’s achievements which are masterful especially in the operatic third act. I can’t delve into the director’s motivations too much or this becomes something else entirely, right? As a fan of the director's work I had a great time feeling uneasy and slightly amused at Jack's escapades. If you want to see the film I recommend a palate cleanser beforehand with some bite to get you ready. Maybe something like von Trier’s The Five Obstructions to alienate you even more. Enjoy!  

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray  

The House That Jack Built arrives on Blu-ray thanks to IFC Films and Scream Factory. Housed in a standard side-by-side keepcase the two-disc set includes a Director’s Cut and Theatrical cut disc. Both discs are BD-50 Region A locked. Once the disc is loaded the logos for IFC, Shout! Factory, Scream Factory are presented then trailers for Radioflash , Greener Grass , and The Nightingale are shown. The static Main Menu screen presents you with typical navigation options.  

Video Review

The image quality for The House That Jack Built is bright and full of detail in this 1080p MPEG-4 AVC encoded transfer. Blacks see some slight noise when Jack enters the freezer with his first victim. Utilizing different aspect ratios for archival footage, animation, and unique insert shots film grain is present in varying degrees and quality. During the majority of Jack’s narrative grain is minimal in the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Primaries are bold with contrast levels a bit high in places though decidedly an artistic preference leaving a dreadfully dismal color palette that mimics an already dismal timeframe. Jack’s 3rd incident ramps up the saturation and fine detail levels as we enter the apex of his self-referential behavior. Facial features, costuming, and the intricate details within scenes are well defined. Natural skin tones throughout especially on Jack’s victims.

Audio Review

The House That Jack Built is provided with a DTS-HD MA 5.1 and its partner in crime the DTS HD-MA 2.0. You don’t lose a great deal by choosing the 2.0 track. It’s all narration, frankly.  Audio is clear and clean free of distortion. A dialogue-heavy film with plenty of weird electronic buzzing and menacing crescendos in the texture which keeps the surround elements minimal unless they’re needed to heighten tension. LFE is minimal but present. The audio mix is predictable, but never dull. Keep the volume up to enhance the experience even more. 

Special Features

Director’s Cut of the Film - Only a minute longer than the Theatrical Cut but it should be clear to anyone who has seen the Director’s Cut what was removed from the feature to secure a theatrical release. It’s all a moot point, really. Both cuts were theatrically screened for an audience. Frankly if you’re in this deep with von Trier you wanna experience the whole enchilada, amirite? 

Sonning Prize: Interview with Lars Von Trier (HD 26:46) Peter Schepelern, associate professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen, interviews Lars Von Trier on his winning of the prestigious Sonning Prize for his contribution to European culture. 

The House That Jack Built Announcement (HD 0:27)

Lars Von Trier Greeting (HD 0:27) 

Cannes Teaser (HD 0:23)

Theatrical Trailer (HD 2:32) - On the Theatrical Cut disc only.

Final Thoughts

The House That Jack Built is a fascinating and controversial film weighted down with deep introspective musings on life, art, and bloody violence. Complete with meta-digressions that would please Dante himself, von Trier’s alarming film turns the lens on himself while providing us with an outstanding performance from Matt Dillon. 

Scream! Factory’s 2 Disc Blu-ray set provides an outstanding A/V presentation and enough bonus features for fans of the film. The inclusion of a Theatrical Cut is purely filler and shouldn’t be a selling point for anyone thinking they can have a watered-down version of The House That Jack Built . I am recommending this one to fans of von Trier as it’s a tough film to digest and an even harder one to watch. For Fans Only. 

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