- Directed by Lars Von Trier
- Written by Lars Von Trier, Jenle Hallund
- Stars Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 32 Minutes
- Trailer: https://youtu.be/BYF2tfdD1fA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This one was strange, with Matt Dillon giving a stellar performance. We find out almost immediately that he’s a serial killer, and we get to relive some of his highlights with him in five acts and an epilogue. It’s long, but only seemed that way for one stretch that dragged a bit, and the ending wraps things up very nicely.
Synopsis
We get some strange voices talking before the credits roll. We are told that the narrator will relate five incidents that occurred over twelve years. He’s talking to Mr. Verge.
1st Incident
A woman flags Jack down on the road and asks for help, but he’s not super helpful. He offers to call the local blacksmith. She’s annoyed at his not having a Jack, but he offers to drive her there. She says he “might as well be a serial killer.” She tells him exactly what he’d do to her if he were a serial killer.
They get to the repair place, and Sonny fixes her Jack. On the way back to the car, she keeps going on about him being a serial killer, even when he offers to change her flat tire. He eventually has enough of her crap and threatens to leave her with her car. The Jack still isn’t right, so he drives her back to Sonny’s again, and she insults him all the way there. He kills her with the Jack, just like she said he would.
We then cut to a lesson on architecture and gothic church arches. Jack is an engineer, but he always wanted to be an architect. He’s recently bought land and started building a house of his own design.
We cut back to Jack taking the woman’s body into a big walk-in freezer in the city. He then cleaned up his van to remove all the evidence.
2nd Incident
Jack spots a woman walking down the road and follows her home. He pretends to be the police and asks her about Carlson’s Supermarket. She asks to see his badge, but he says he doesn’t have it on him. He says his badge is at the silversmith’s place getting shined up. He’s weird, and she’s not really buying it.
He sees a photo of her husband on the wall and says he might be able to get her pension doubled. He then admits he was lying about being a policeman; he’s really an insurance agent. She drools at the double-pension thing and lets him right in. He soon strangles her. That doesn’t really work, so he force-feeds her a donut until she chokes on it. That doesn’t work, so he strangles her again. And then finally stabs her. It’s a lot of work!
Jack then wraps her body in plastic, drags her out to the van, and cleans up inside. He describes himself as a murderer with OCD– cleaning compulsions. He goes back inside and cleans some more. Twice. No, once more makes three times.
A policeman drives by, so Jack pulls the body out and puts it in the nearby trees. The policeman asks him to get out of his car and questions him about a break-in down the street. Jack says that Claire has gone missing. He looks inside the van, and then inside the house. The cop throws him out, so Jack gets back in the van and drives away with the body tied to his bumper. There’s not much of Claire left by the time he gets to his meat locker.
We get a flashback to young Jack as a child, snipping the legs off ducklings.
Time passes, and we see that Jack eventually learns how to strangle women properly. After several more murders, Jack says that his OCD started diminishing, and he took bigger and bigger chances. We learn about Jack’s obsession with photography, especially the negatives.
3rd Incident
Jack takes a woman and her kids out shooting. He talks to them about hunting, which he finds distasteful. He goes on and on about how awful hunting and hunters are. He brags about how he applies “ethical hunting rules” when he hunts the family down. He tries to do taxidermy on the children.
We see that Jack isn’t happy with the cinderblocks he started building his house with, so he has all that torn down and starts again.
4th Incident
Jack talks about his romantic interest in this one woman. This one has a name, Jacqueline, but he calls her “Simple.” He clearly thinks she’s stupid, and she doesn’t do much to prove otherwise. He tells her that he’s killed 60 people and that he’s a serial killer. She calls him weird.
He gets a magic marker and draws “butcher’s meat cutting lines” on her body as she sits there and takes it. She runs outside to tell a cop, and then Jack runs out and says it’s all true. The cop thinks they’re both drunk and drives away.
He makes her scream repeatedly to show her the neighbors won’t get involved. He’s getting more and more reckless.
Mr. Verge asks if Jack hates women. He says no, he’s killed men as well. He’s torn down his house and started rebuilding several times now. They talk about art, icons, the Holocaust, and many other things.
5th Incident
Jack kidnaps a man and takes him to the meat locker full of bodies. There are several other men there chained together and freezing. He wants to experiment with killing multiple people with a single bullet. One prisoner tells Jack he’s using the wrong kind of ammunition.
Jack returns to Al’s place and angrily complains about the mislabeled ammunition. Al wants to see a receipt. He gets really nervous about the whole transaction, and Al knows something is wrong. Jack goes to see S.P., an old man, who says the police visited both Al and Jack about what he’s done. S.P. holds Jack at gunpoint as he calls Rob to come over.
They’ve known each other for years. They sit and have drinks, and then Jack sticks a knife in the old man’s head. Jack leaves with one full metal jacket cartridge. Rob the policeman shows up, and Jack kills him and steals the police car. He drives it back to the meat locker place and asks the man inside as to the quality of his ammo now. He leaves the police car outside, with the lights still on.
He loads the gun on a special tripod with the men all bound up in a row. As he messes around with measurements and getting more room for his shot, more police show up to investigate the car outside. As Jack gets ready to pull the trigger, he finds Mr. Verge in the back room of the meat locker.
Verge asks Jack about building his house. Whatever happened to that? Verge suggests that Jack can find the material to build his house right there in the meat locker.
Jack builds his house… out of the many frozen bodies he has there. The police cut their way through the barricaded door, but Jack goes into his meat house and crawls into a hole beneath the floor.
Epilogue
Jack and Verge are in a dark place. They travel in tunnels down, down, down into another world. As they travel, they hear a humming buzz getting loud, and Verge says that it’s the sound of the millions of souls in Hell suffering all at once. They proceed on and on, with wilder and wilder imagery, down into Hell.
Jack asks about a stairway out of Hell that’s across a broken bridge. Jack thinks it’s possible to climb around the pit of lava. He starts climbing…
Commentary
The first killing is pretty routine as far as these things go, but with the second one, Jack’s OCD pumps up the ridiculousness factor.
Matt Dillon does really well here; his weird manner of speech really shows us that he’s a psychopath.
It was really starting to drag during the speechifying after the 4th incident. The Faustian ending makes up for the slow bit in the middle. It’s just plain bizarre.
Neither of us had seen this one before, and we both really liked it!