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.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lmKTCtLGMrZ%2BarF2frqS3jJusoqSkYn9xfZc%3D