I dunno folks, I've watched a lot of weird shit in my time but this one got to me. A man called Jack is sitting up in a hunting blind wielding a high powered hunting rifle. Below him an all American family, red caps and all, hides terrified. He's loving the thrill of the hunt and getting off from the fear of his soon to be victims below. A young boy runs and is gunned down. The other child pops his head up from cover and.........well.....yeah.
Jack is a serial killer and he's giving an account of his 5 favourite murders to a man unseen to us. Women he picks up on the side of the road, families he's built friendships with, women he claims to care for, and unfortunate random folk who have the bad luck to cross his path. He's a smug man, a man with a need to boast and a man who thinks he's far more clever than he actually is (luck is always on his side) and his strange desires have lead him to a dark and dank place.
I did not like this. Hated it tbh. Felt bad about myself for caving into the buzz surrounding it. When you hear about a new cause celebre you can't be help be curious. It's like walking past an accident. You feel compelled to look despite every instinct telling you to run. It's the same here. The hype around this was big. It was from a controversial director who's well known for pushing the limits of what can be shown onscreen. The buzz sucked me in. Call it fomo. And that fomo left me queasy and troubled. It's not because it was a bad film though; it's well done and with extremely effective acting from Matt Dillon as Jack and Uma Thurman and Riley Keough as a couple of the people who had the bad luck to meet him. Had this been a cheap crappy DTV film full of terrible acting it would have been far easier to take.
Director Lars Von Trier is an odd fish. A man plagued by accusations of misogyny and harrassment over the years, both personally and in his films. A man who claimed to be sympathetic to Hitler, a claim that got him temporarily banned from the Cannes film festival. One of his last films, Antichrist, had the main female lead cutting off her clitoris in close up with a scissors. He has history of pushing buttons to stir controversy and it's plain to see here and it feels like a greatest hits of his career controversies played out onscreen. Jack's in your face hatred of women mirroring what's been said about Von Trier over the years but pushed to the max. The nazi sympathising in a scene where Jack has a paean about the beauty of a German Stukka war plane. The moment a young Jack mutilates a duck (done with cgi thankfully but still awful) harking back to the controversy about animal cruelty during the production of Manderlay. The whole thing feels like a big fuck you to the people who've complained about him over the years. "Look at what they say about me and they still let me make movies."
As mentioned earlier it's annoyingly well made though and does cleverly play with our expectations. The awful irony of the Trumpian red capped family meeting their makers in the way they do for example. Throughout the movie we see that Jack's kills are clumsy and very uncinematic. But then near the end he devises something involving multiple victims that feels more at home in a Saw film. It's brutal, the sort of thing only a supremely warped mind could come up with........but the odd thing is you end up kind of curious has to how it would actually work. It's that walking past an accident thing again. You know you shouldn't look but a morbid curiosity has you staring at the screen gawping. Until Von Trier continuously pulls the rug from under us and Jack, things blocking him pulling off his ultimate murder and stopping us from seeing the messy results. It's smart stuff and I hated it for making me want to see what happened.
It's a strange one. Not a film I could recommend to people but at the same time I know there's people who'll like it way more than I did. It's horrific in places, blazingly pretentious in others. It will get you thinking though.
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