Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we look at why Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built is one of the funniest movies of the last decade.
After being banned from the Cannes Film Festival and finishing his Depression Trilogy, Lars von Trier returned from a five-year hiatus with The House That Jack Built. The film follows a sadistic, failed architect named Jack (Matt Dillon) who recalls his murders to the ancient Roman poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), as the pair make their way through Hell. To Virgil’s disgust, Jack sees these incidents as misunderstood works of art.
When the film premiered at Cannes, it prompted a one-hundred-person walkout and a ten-minute standing ovation. While the festival is known for its dramatic receptions, The House That Jack Built is, indeed, a polarizing film. It’s is either the nail in the coffin for von Trier’s career or the darkest comedy of 2018. Depends on who you ask.
As Ryan Hollinger puts it in the video essay below: The House That Jack Built is what you get when you give a serial killer two and a half hours to gush about how great they are. On paper that sounds like a recipe for disaster. But on the screen, the iffy conceit materializes as a mocking character study of the kind of ego-trip that thinks it’s so charming and clever that it can get away anything.
Ultimately, The House that Jack Built is a film that turns a monster into a punchline. And if you let go of seriousness and pretension, the film reveals itself as an absurd, self-effacing, and divinely funny comedy.
Watch “Why is The House That Jack Built So Messed Up?!“:
Who made this?
Ryan Hollinger is a Northern Irish video essayist with a background in design and animation who specializes in horror films. Indulging in a healthy dose of nostalgia, Hollinger is contagiously endearing, entertaining, and informative. You can check out Hollinger’s podcast The Carryout on SoundCloud here. And you can subscribe to Hollinger’s YouTube account here.
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- Like Lars von Trier, Kevin Smith is an acquired taste. Here’s Hollinger’s impressively thoughtful and generous analysis of Kevin Smith’s bizarre horror trilogy
- Here’s Hollinger on why Cannibal Holocaust has a well-earned reputation as one of the most controversial horror movies of all time
- How von Trier uses discomfort to force his audience to confront taboos
- Lars von Trier films feel “real” in a way that a lot of folks find upsetting. Here’s a video by The Cinema Cartography on how von Trier bulldozes emersion to capture human drama