By I guess adding Uma Thurman to any movie automatically shifts it into a Quentin Tarantino film. Even Lars Von Trier, a director not known for making movies most folks would describe as fun, isn’t immune. The first trailer for his newest work, The House that Jack Built, looks like a freewheeling joyride through nihilism and violence that I would have not expected to see.
I mean, nihilism sure, violence yeah, but not anything that looks this exciting.
Matt Dillon leads as Jack, a serial killer who views his murders as art, and he has this vicious enthusiasm, staring at his hands and smiling for the camera with a blood-streaked face. There are splices of very on-the-nose symbolism through cartoons, tigers, lambs, along with verbose posturing on the part of Jack. This all feels very Von Trier, but with added layers of crowd pleasing 70’s grindhouse-styled violence and performance that give it an opposite kind of energy than what Antichrist offered.
The name Lars Von Trier elicits a number of reactions, mostly eye rolls in a post-Nymphomaniac world, but I have a feeling that if The House that Jack Built is executed anything like this trailer, the director will win back plenty of fans.
Cannes: Matt Dillion Is Murderous in First Trailer for Lars Von Trier’s ‘The House That Jack Built’ [THR]
