Lars von Trier aims to tease, rather than please. Stoically handsome American engineer and would-be architect Jack (Matt Dillon) becomes a serial killer when he’s pushed into a corner by an emasculating harpy (Uma Thurman).
Is this an anti-feminist tract? As Jack starts stocking his freezer full of females, a mysterious European personage, Verge (Bruno Ganz), accuses him of misogyny. Later, shots from von Trier’s own films — famously full of female suffering — are used to illustrate the point that artists play out crimes in fiction that civilisation prohibits.
The Danish director is denouncing both his own oeuvre and his own, quote unquote, arrogant and offensive persona. Yet he does it with so much self-regard that his stance seems the opposite of contrite. Basically, this is a fake confession, a two-and-a-half hour joke.
Dillon is drily amusing, especially when Jack is gripped by OCD madness. Most of the other actors, though, are starved of funny lines. Sofie Gråbøl (from The Killing) — as a mother of two boys on a hunting trip — merely gets to look stricken. Riley Keough, as flaky party girl Simple, is yet another mouse who the cat-like Jack tortures.
Back in 1955, Charles Laughton’s experimental masterpiece The Night of the Hunter explored the relationship between predator and prey, with heaps more light and shade. Von Trier has made sublime films of his own and his best works (Breaking the Waves, Dogville, the TV series The Kingdom) have a cheeky if despairing warmth. This film, by contrast, is as cold as a morgue. I couldn’t wait to exit the building.
