![]() In one, he candidly presents himself as an emotionally inert person who, in order not to attract suspicion, teaches himself to feign emotional responses, practicing making faces in a mirror to express emotion in effect, he trains himself to become an actor, modelling his facial expressions on those of people in closeup news images that he has pasted onto the wall around his mirror. Only a few brief sequences offer any psychological illumination of Jack’s amoral pathology. ![]() For instance, there’s a sickening scene in which Jack cuts off a woman’s breasts, a deed that, reportedly, is depicted more explicitly in the longer version.) Each murder also has its aftermath: Jack owns a walk-in freezer in a desolate part of town (the action is set in the state of Washington), where he stashes-rather, stores-the bodies of his victims, and his transportation of the bodies there, in his red van, along with the circumstances of their storage, becomes a part of the action as well. (There is an unrated director’s cut of the film that contains approximately four minutes of additional material, which I haven’t seen, but the R-rated version includes plenty of gore and horror. In effect, each of the movie’s five segments is an extended variety of the ear-cutting in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”: Jack makes contact with, or is already in the company of, his victims, and he toys with them, in anticipation of what may be the moment of opportunity or only the moment of desire, in which he can enact the violent plan he has in mind. Yet the movie’s five episodes of murder, sticking close to Jack’s confessions, offer little backstory and little context outside his arachnid schemes. Those reminiscences, punctuated by the men’s dialogue, are the substance of the film, and it soon becomes clear that Verge is Virg-i.e., Virgil, who, as in Dante’s Inferno, is guiding the protagonist’s soul down to Hell. They’re on a long trip together: Verge is leading, Jack is following, and, in the course of their journey, Jack is confessing to a series of what he calls “randomly chosen incidents” selected from his twelve-year killing spree. The movie has a framing device that’s a bit of a mystery at the start: throughout his criminal exploits, Jack is in internal dialogue with another, unseen character, whom he calls Verge (voiced by Bruno Ganz). Rather, von Trier relies on the film’s tired premise (yet another serial-killer movie, set this time in an age before cell phones) to embrace a wide (though absurdly shallow) range of cultural history. The action is set in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, yet it hardly makes contact with the particulars of those times (other than props and costumes). That’s the mantle that Lars von Trier, a longtime filmmaker of cynicism and cruelty, adopts in his new film, “The House That Jack Built.” It’s a drama about a serial killer named Jack (Matt Dillon), and it depicts his reminiscences of five episodes of murder from among the dozens that he has committed, interspersed with his intellectualizing rationalizations of his life of crime. Pull your pants down in public, you’re an exhibitionist pull someone else’s down, you’re a sadist pull someone else’s down and talk about it, you’re a moral philosopher.
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