Lars von Trier
La casa di Jack

What impressed me, an unaware spectator, is the apparent randomness of the first incident and the subsequent dizzying escalation of events.

• I will provisionally divide my account into five randomly chosen incidents over a period of twelve years.

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The story begins with these words spoken by a voiceover. On the full screen, meanwhile, the writing appears: 1st INCIDENT.

The speaker is Jack, narrator and protagonist of the narrated episodes. He is speaking to someone along a route, a guide (Bruno Ganz) who has heard it all before: “I don't think you could tell me anything I haven't heard before,” he says.

In any case, as they move cheerfully forward, Jack (an extraordinary Matt Dillon), the narrator, recalls and recounts episodes from his life, with the game already played.

As the two voiceovers fade away, the scene opens on a country road that Jack was traveling about twelve years earlier: here he meets a woman (Uma Thurman) who, forced by a mechanical failure, asks for help, but the jack is broken. She convinces him to give her a ride, and during the car journey, she doesn't stop talking for a moment:

• - Oops, it was a mistake. - she says.
• - Mistake? -
• - Yes, getting in the car with you: isn't that what mothers warned about, not getting in the car with strangers? -

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He seems silent, she a nagging, importunate, and invasive woman. He could be a serial killer, she insinuates.

Yet, the journey continues without hurdles to the first and second destination. The two go back and forth from the car to the town, from the town to the car, and again, from the car to… but the provocations continue, and the jack is too within Jack's reach: the material is in the hands of the architect, he would say.

These are the events that occur in the first ten minutes of The house that Jack built; a film that starts cautiously to not lose anyone, a film in which events are destined to become more complicated and escalate in violence and atrocity. The rest of the film will portray the so-called five incidents of Jack, five so-called artworks chosen among his countless ones.

The scenic-autobiographical representations of the incidents alternate with reflective and universal scenes, through which every disturbing action carried out by Jack in his life is re-read, interpreted, and justified by his architect mind, afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder and struck by repeated and persistent impulses. These reflections alternate moments of epiphanic lucidity with other moments of overused literary clichés. The cues are many, aesthetically beautiful, and are offered in an attempt to explain what seems abnormal.

Jack's universal theories germinate from speculative reflections on his condition and create fascinating analogies, such as the metaphor of shadows and street lamps:

• A man walking on a street illuminated by street lamps, when he is perpendicular to the light of a lamp, kills. The shadow in front of him grows: it is his pleasure. But as he approaches the next lamp, behind him, pain begins to emerge until the pleasure disappears and the pain is darker and more intense. Then he reaches the next lamp, and kills.

A metaphor that is just one of the countless explanations: from the pianistic speculations on the multifaceted nature of an art that includes both murders and sublime hidden works one moves to digressions on a salvific rain to arrive at a clear and admired list of personal character traits (egotism, obscenity, roughness, impulsivity, narcissism, intelligence, irrationality, manipulation, verbal superiority) proposed in a Dylan-esque staging; it goes from the reflection on the will of the material that influences the work of the architect to the personal exegesis of Blake's metaphor of the tiger and the lamb. And so on.

A masterful representation, namely Lars' double gaze: In this film, Lars' gaze strikes in two ways. The scenic part is characterized by the use of handheld camera is more than a residue of what was Dogma 95. Instead, in the reflective one, there is a broad and widespread use of analog montage, much to the joy of that genius Villaggio, who immortalized the comic quality of the word: the faunal, artistic, musical images are evocative and explode the narrative towards countless other directions.

And for those who ask: did we need another film about a serial killer? I say this is not another film, this is the film, Lars Von Trier's film.