Lars von Trier
La casa di Jack

The grape clusters are rotting on the vine, the berries deform horribly. They look like corpses disfigured by a violent death. Yet, those rotting fruits will produce delightful beverages, and their agony itself will make them sweeter.

Death as an artistic act, as a component not only essential but predominant in life. The destruction of Jack's house is a fertile moment as much as its building, if not more. And for a reversed ethical-aesthetic taste, the protagonist even tortures those close to him, his "family" (unspecified) and his girlfriends.

The Bible read by Satan, this is Jack's vision. And the protagonist speaks from off-screen, while slow images of his crimes play, confessing to an interlocutor and philosophically arguing his life conduct—using varied images and metaphors.

Von Trier transforms the actions of a particularly zealous serial killer into a universal battle between Eros and Thanatos. This time, rather than completely ignoring reason and common morality, he challenges them, putting them in competition in a rigorous dialogue. If the viewer manages to overcome the shock of the blood, if they manage to abstract from the contingent situation and project onto themselves the destructive urges, they will realize how much sense there is, not so much in Jack's thesis, but in the dialectic between the sides. Even he, presumably innocent sheep, is part of the light as well as the abyss. And it is therefore necessary to give voice and meaning to the infinite, relentless decay of things.

The director has never been so diplomatic, showing horror and its condemnation, giving voice to the demon and its victims, empathizing (or attempting to) and not judging anyone. The idea of overlaying the off-screen voices that comment is brilliant and gives the film a meditative cadence: it's a continuous search for meaning, which also lives through handheld camera shots and zooms that provide uncertainty and irregularity, while silences carve out an amoral space where one tries to cling to something. And in that void, death and horror appear in their familiarity because there are no superstructures and conventions hiding them. The cries of the victims get lost in general indifference (eventually becoming a whisper). The music, sudden and daring, acts as a satirical counterpoint to established moral norms.

As in the best cinema, the film demands to be completed by those who watch it. And the director gives us all the time to anticipate the bitter taste of blood. He places the current tiger and lamb in tight spaces, small cages with no escape (which are the world) or in situations where the prey is still condemned because the predator is in too advantageous a position. Then he makes us wait, torturing us in anticipation of the inevitable violent act. In those minutes of anxiety and bewilderment, the viewer wanders, searching for a reason. The off-screen voices help, always dialectically opposed, but it is up to the viewer to understand how necessary (or not) it is for the tiger to hunt and feed.

The true provocation is to transpose the ferocity of the animal into the human who, in theory, deliberates and chooses. It is a stretch, but perhaps not so much, because the interpretation lies higher and more universally: Jack condenses in himself all possible deviations, he is a symbol and sublimation of "evil." Relentless, not due to a sudden outburst, but because he represents an essential component of the life-death cycle. This is why I find the image of the rotting grapes producing fine distillates perfect (which is the art Jack intends to make of his crimes, through photographs, sculptures, artifacts).

The protagonist's personality is not coherent, it piles onto him an improbable amount of deviant traits, from obsessiveness to emotional complexes, from cold-blooded ruthlessness to love for art. He is a conceptual monstrum, a philosophical idea. And he represents not only the necessity of evil but seeks to emphasize its beauty, its aesthetic force. A thesis of which the film is the prime example: the taste for the horrifying and the morbid curiosity inherent in human beings are undeniable. Thus death not only as an essential ontological element but also as an artistic object capable of arousing human interest and curiosity. We who watch this film are the immediate example of this.

Very high ambitions that risk not being understood in some phases of the film when the cadence becomes less meditative and more "thrilling." In the second half, the routine becomes somewhat tedious. About half an hour of footage could have been cut without losing anything conceptually. Moreover, the final part seems to nullify the discourse sustained until that moment, with a "metaphysical" twist that can only be accepted as a further provocation.

(Spoilers on the ending) There is the Catabasis, and the dialoguing voice is not a psychoanalyst but Virgil, who accompanies Jack to hell. A Dantesque choice that has nothing to do with von Trier's usual approach. Or rather, if hell were indeed Earth itself (as it seems at first), then it would have been an appreciable and coherent deception. But instead, there is a chasm of lava, which is hard to understand, except as a further provocation, but its signals are not apparent.

7.5/10