The house built by Lars von Trier. Let’s talk about a scary movie (18+)

Sometimes, we look for the beautiful in the terrible. I will tell you my opinion about the movie “The House That Jack Built”

Take the children away from the screens, because, no joke, today I will tell you about places, a shocking film, in places there will be shots, which means (as it was said in one series) the post is not recommended for viewing by anyone.

“I was brought up with the idea of ​​not believing in either good or evil. And the fact that everything has its own explanation. There are no absolute extremes like good and evil, there are mistakes and misunderstanding”(c)Lars von Trier

I will start with myself and my perception. At a young age, I came across a forensics site that posted photos of crime scenes and executions, and just for fun, I bookmarked it as my home page. Eventually, fate took me to work in a forensic medical examination, where I also had time to see certain things. My perception of everything inanimate although has a share of human disgust, but after some events I came to the conclusion that death can either be perceived with a smile on the face or being in a loop, because it is impossible to experience the transition of any living being from one state to another as some tragedy Therefore, I do not justify cruelty, but I have the right to study it and consider it from a slightly different angle than it usually happens in people. Now let’s move on to the movie.

The story tells us about a certain “artist” who sees his creativity in killing living beings. He approaches this or that murder with deep enthusiasm, so each death in the film is different from the previous one. But the feature of the film is far from the murders.

Before watching the film, I saw a lot of reviews in the spirit of “what a mess”, “where did they go” and “what a waste of time”. The most terrifying moments of the film were shown in the trailer. The trailer here is built (in my opinion) correctly, and…wife, for example, immediately refused to watch this film. That is, after watching the trailer, there is enough information to decide whether you need to watch this particular movie or not. The feeling is that people either went to this movie out of the blue, or specifically did not watch the trailer.

At the time of watching the film, all I knew about Lars von Trier was that … he made Nymphomaniac (which I did not watch), and…everything. I did not look at any of his other paintings and was not interested in the peculiarities of his works. After the trailer, I was expecting an outright thrashing, and if the footage with the toenails being cut off was not the most pleasant for me, I expected something even scarier in the film itself, but I hope you are not. There was nothing particularly scary anymore.

Next, let’s go with our heads, so plot spoilers are possible.

1st incident. I am Jack’s broken jack

Immersion in the story happens gradually. We’re ready for something to happen to the girl Jack picked up by the side of the road. But she outwits him, saying that the car is somehow painfully similar to those in which kidnapped people are transported. And, in general, a place where they look like those where hardened maniacs can easily bury their victim, who, given the right schedule, no one will find. His appearance is also similar to the typical appearance of a maniac (to me, however, at first he reminded me of Jim Carrey). Every time a girl insists on asking for help, the feeling is that a murder is about to happen, but our hero is patient and does not succumb to provocation. The last straw was Jack’s rebuke that a mattress like him couldn’t be a maniac.

Here we are introduced to one of the main ideas of the film. Jack leaves the car of the murdered woman on the border of two states, thinking that this is the zone where each party will not find out what kind of car is in the bushes, because it is “none of their business”. Indifference to other people’s problems.

2nd incident. I am Jack’s bloody tears

Jack knocks on the woman’s door, posing as a police officer. She doesn’t believe him and asks for a token, but without getting confirmation that it is really a policeman, the woman lets him into the house, trusting the words that she has acquaintances who will allow her to increase her pension payments. The victim turns out to be unsuccessfully strangled, which made Jack think about the fact that it is worth learning how to properly strangle victims. Considering the fact that this was the first victim he photographed, it can be assumed that this is where his journey as a “creator” begins. In the evening, a policeman discovers Jack’s car next to the missing woman’s house. Jack himself returns to the house several times, remembering that he may not have removed traces of blood everywhere. The police ask to show the trunk of the car, where there is nothing. He enters the house himself (Jack enters behind him and it is logical to think that he will kill the policeman now), but he asks to examine the premises more carefully, which leads us to think that Jack wants to be caught. This is what the subsequent story says, where after the policeman asks Jack to leave the house, he leaves, ties the bag with the woman’s corpse to the car and goes to the warehouse where he stores his victims.

As if trying to play hide-and-seek, it feels like Jack left a trail of blood directly from the house. catch me But it starts raining, the plans are ruined, and Jack realizes that the moment has not yet come, and a clever departure from the non-chasing, which has not begun, prompts the idea of ​​calling himself Mr. Subtlety.

3rd incident. I am Jack’s loving family

We are taken to the hunting grounds. Most likely, this is Jack’s own land (on which, by the way, he is really building a house. Trying). It is difficult to imagine a situation in which a single woman with two children decided to come to a man who will talk about hunting, but a nice family picnic, as it should, ends with the murder of the children first, and then the mother herself. There is an assumption that Jack was angered by the originally grumpy child Grumpy, who later (not least thanks to the knowledge of the main character in taxidermy) finally began to smile. Let the dead.

At the end, we see another of Jack’s works – a painting made of dead crows and a mother with children.

4th incident. I’m Jack’s stupid girlfriend

Is a killer capable of love? Maybe, but if it’s self-love. Jack confesses that he has killed 60 people, later states that it is more than 60. His soon-to-be/former crush doesn’t particularly understand the inaccuracy in the number, but he does understand that something is wrong with her. After learning that there is a known maniac in her room (the film has no data on murders beyond what is shown), she runs outside, trying to ask for help from a policeman who is sitting in a car nearby. But the policeman does not believe her, just as he does not believe Jack himself, who openly declares that he is a maniac who has killed many people. Afterwards, he asks the girl to scream for help. But none of the neighbours hears. She screams out the window, but no one pays attention to her screams. We are once again led to think that we live in a world where people are angry at each other and at other people’s problems.

5th incident. I’m Jack’s stupid ball

The point of the main story is a kind of finishing touch. The desire to check how many consecutive heads a bullet fired from a sniper rifle can penetrate. Because of a negligent ammo salesman, Jack finds himself in a situation where he has everything but the all-metal bullet he needs. In search of her, Jack goes to an old acquaintance, he realizes that something is wrong with him and calls the police. As a result, our hero has to kill both of them, and rush to his icy shelter with flashing lights at full speed. Again, due to the illogicality of the picture, there is an assumption that in this way he wanted to lead the police to the place with many corpses, collected by him during the years of “creativity”. As a result, this is what happens, and the story ends with the fact that Jack did find the perfect material for his house – the bodies of his victims.

This story is about the world around us. A story about people and their indifference. Reluctance to help anyone. This is a story that shows that to some extent the ordinary people around us are more terrifying monsters than the maniac himself. After all, even conditionally openly carrying people’s bodies, previously wanting to hide them from someone’s eye, in the end he came to the conclusion that everyone would sneeze at each other, so no one would look for him.

Can this story be considered really possible? Quite. Can the film be considered extremely violent? I don’t think so. Read the weekly summaries, and I’m sure you’ll come across at least one case that will cause you utter confusion and horror. And it will be something that can happen to everyone, and not a picture of a movie compiled on a computer.

This film is not for everyone, but at the same time it is about everyone. About me, about you, about all those who do not always properly pay attention to other people’s problems. In the film, there are many interesting arguments, which the main character tentatively leads with Verge (a reference to Virgil from the “Divine Comedy”), but most likely with himself. When I watched the film, my attention was drawn less to the murders and more to these considerations. They are the whole value of this picture.

When I saw that the movie was going to be 2.5 hours, I thought it was going to be long (for a movie where ducks’ feet are cut off). When 21 minutes had passed, I thought about it. that 6+ more times and the movie will end, but the further the story was told, the more I immersed myself in it, and as a result, it seemed that the movie was watched in one breath. Initially, this film was conceived as a series, and I am glad that the author was able to fit it into a 2.5-hour film, because we already had the experience of watching series, the idea of ​​which would have been enough for a few hours.

I won’t judge Lars von Trier himself as a director, but if I like his other film as well, I’ll probably add it to the list of my favourites. Movie rating? Let it be 8 out of 10.