A Film a Week - The House that Jack Built

Well, fuck you Lars von Trier. Fuck your depression, self-loathing and, most of all, the nerve to try to pull it through a half-cooked metaphor with a serial killer in its centre. Fuck your Jack and the house he has never built (ups, spoiler). Fuck the broken jack he uses as tool in the first murder he describes as an incident.

Fuck your fear of flying that makes you trying poorly to “design” the Pacific Northwest somewhere in the forests of Denmark and to use the same-looking fucking street from The Nymphomaniac over and over again. Fuck your fake logos and randomly selected American cars that do not fit in the surroundings.

Fuck your Nazi biological father that probably does not know about your existence and fuck your irrational need to make him (and yourself) look better. Fuck your constant and infantile need for provoking and trolling your audience with the same thing from your arsenal over and over and over again. Fuck your misogyny, fuck your shock tactics, fuck your perpetual need to weep like a child about the world being cruel to you.

Fuck your post-Dogma, but still ugly, aesthetics, your hand-held shots from close by, your muddy-grey colours and the explosion of kitsch you are saving for the “big finale”. Fuck your voice-over narration you, oh, so, insist on. Fuck your “five chapters and an epilogue” structure. Fuck your framing of a story inside a confession of some sort. Fuck you for underestimating the intellectual abilities of your audiences (they are not the stupid characters you create after all) and trying to mask a Dante reference with the character named Verge.

Fuck your broad knowledge you are trying to impress us with. Most of it still can be found on Wikipedia. Fuck your digressions you have already tried in your previous films. Fuck your reliance on the bullshit psychoanalysis for dummies for thinking you should pile up all the personality disorders in one person. Fuck you for not knowing a thing about serial killers, yet writing a film about one. Fuck your bullshit Google-Translate-like dialogue.

Fuck you for thinking that the murder is an art in your alter-ego’s mind. Fuck your disturbing murder fantasies. Fuck your casual animal cruelty as the singular thing you use as a sorry excuse for character building. Fuck your ego-trips to include your films and your films only to the world’s art heritage. Fuck you for being actually more than good director, capable of doing something meaningful and not just pulling the same-old same-old stunts. Fuck your little gems of the scenes and montages you even have in this pile of vomit movie.

Fuck your casting choices making all of your actors look bad. You do not cast Uma Thurman for the nameless role of a cold-hearted and stupid bitch. You do not cast Riley Keough for an offensive role like this. You do not cast Bruno Ganz to keep him off the screen for three quarters of the film. And Matt Dillon playing your alter-ego has the same facial expression not of a person in the midst of an internal turmoil, but of a pathetic drunk. Does not that tell you something?

And, finally, fuck you for denying me the opportunity to hate The House that Jack Built from the bottom of my heart, wildly and passionately because it is as tedious as it is preposterous. Maybe you are doing all this, filmmaking and trolling and trolling via filmmaking as some sort of a self-imposed therapy. Do not. It does not make anyone feel better, and, judging with the progression of your films, certainly not you.