BEFORE: Bruno Ganz carries over from "The Boys from Brazil", and if I count the short clip of "Downfall" that appeared in "Look Who's Back", which I do, this makes five films in a row for Bruno, not a bad little string. Except it's all been about Nazis and now a serial killer, and only one of them was a comedy - before that the last thing I watched that was even close to a comedy was "The Upside", and that was a dark comedy. I'm thinking now that I probably should have re-programmed things a bit after the pandemic hit, because I could really use some laughs right about now, and the late-night shows are no help. My wife and I re-watched "Life of Brian" over this past weekend, and that was some help, but I'd had some beer and ended up falling asleep, partially because the movie was so familiar and comforting. Also, my sleeping schedule is completely messed up without a job to be late for, so I'm going to bed at 6 am most days and sleeping until about 1 pm. Before the virus hit, I'd often sack out at 4 am and get up at 11 am - still late for work but at least I looked like I was trying, now all bets are sort of off. Anyway, I think there are a couple of comedies on the horizon, and they're sorely needed, so I'll try to enjoy and appreciate them. But first I have to get there.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" (Movie #3,393)
THE PLOT: The story follows Jack, a highly intelligent serial killer, over the course of twelve years and depicts the murders that really develop his inner madman.
AFTER: I'm going to end up on some watchlist, I just know it. My one saving grace is that I've proven over the last few years that I will watch JUST about anything, so the matrixes that Amazon and Netflix and other services might use on me have pretty much given up on recommending things to me. I imagine that some computer software somewhere is going, "Hey, we could recommend THIS movie to him - nah, he's already seen that. What about - no, he's seen that, too. What about this obscure Swedish detective film that won that prize at the Cannes Festival? Nope, it's on his watchlist. To hell with it, he's on his own, let him watch whatever else he finds." But at the very least, I expect to hear from some friends after I post on Twitter, thinking perhaps that my recent film selections are a cry for help - and perhaps they are.
Look, I don't know much about the films of Lars von Trier, before this I've only seen "Melancholiaa" and "Dogville", and I sure didn't understand that last one. This one just seems like a bunch of murder porn, and that's not really my scene. Some people swear by "American Psycho", but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe everything in that film was real, maybe it was imagined, I don't care, it's still pretty sick. I read a few passages from that book once and just could not believe what was on the page, if you're into that book for any reason, please, get some professional help. And I don't care how "meta" today's film is, like even if the victims joke about the serial killer being a serial killer, and that's part of what helps turn him into a serial killer, that hardly matters. You can't wink at the audience while one character is beating or stabbing another to death, it's not cool, or even that edgy, it's just gross.
There were two things, though, that were sort of semi-redeeming here, though SPOILER ALERT if you have any intention of seeing this one in the future, which I don't recommend doing. (It was released in theaters for just one day, apparently, so either that's an admission of failure or an embarassment over the end result, or it's some distributor cutting their own losses before the public could decide that the film was a bomb.). The first interesting thing, and the reason why I can't score this film as a "1", which I've only done in a very few rare cases, is that it depicts a serial killer with OCD - at least in one of the five "episodes", then his condition very noticably is not mentioned again in the other segments. I mean, I guess maybe a compulsive disorder is possible, he has a compulsion to kill, why not also a compulsion to clean up afterwards? So many serial killers have such bad manners, leaving a mangled corpse behind, or even if they remove the body, there's still a pool of blood and spatter everywhere. Look, I watched a ton of "CSI" back in the day, and some killers do manage to clean up afterwards, and in real life some people do literally get away with murder, maybe it's the killers who clean up well afterwards that are the most successful.
But then, which is stronger, the compulsion to kill or the compulsion to clean? You have to figure it's the killing one, right, because if the compulsion to not make a mess was stronger, then they wouldn't ever kill anybody, why make a bigger cleaning job for yourself if you don't have to? Now I wonder if the police ever find a body that was stabbed exactly 50 times, and the coroner says, "Either someone really hated this guy, or we're looking at a serial killer with OCD, and he was trying to get it EXACTLY right..." I think if von Trier had played up this OCD angle a bit more, we could be looking at an OK dark comedy like "The Voices", but as I said before, he dropped this story angle pretty quickly. This doesn't make sense because people don't just get over their OCD, it tends to sticks with them, but a few killings later, Jack's all cool and nonchalant about hunting people, and that just didn't feel like there was any consistency to the character.
I think the less said about the middle part of this movie, the better. (It's just a guy doing a lot of killing - and again, if you find this interesting, look into therapy or get on some medication or something.). But at the very end, it gets a little interesting again. Not much, but a little. For the whole film, we've heard Jack dictating the details of these five incidents (murders) to someone named "Verge". But one particular line of dialogue relates to the Greek hero Aeneas, and it was the poet Virgil who wrote the Aeneid. But a little research tells me that Virgil was also a character in Dante's "Divine Comedy", he was the guide in the afterlife through all the levels of purgatory and hell. Ah, now we're getting somewhere, though it's a little old school, maybe the serial killer is dead and he's got to describe these incidents from his life so the powers that be can decide what circle of hell he belongs in - like the sorting hat in "Harry Potter", only more morbid.
This would seem to be the most likely interpretation of the last act of the film, with Virgil acting as the guide and taking Jack on a Dante-like tour of the afterlife. Though I admit that other interpretations are possible - Jack's having a dream, Jack has gone insane, etc. But I think it's probably a form of wish fulfillment for the audience, we've seen the terrible things that Jack has done, and it might be helpful to think that he will end up paying for his crimes, if not in this life, then in the one beyond. But what if that's not true? What if Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy or even Hitler were never called to answer for what they did? Would that mean, based on common Judeo-Christian ideology that the universe was fundamentally broken, or could we accept that it's just the way it is? Is that a downside to being an atheist or an agnostic, that I have to acknowledge that some people don't get cosmic justice, other than no longer existing? Or do we just have to move the bar a little and say, "Well, death is a state of non-being, and if there's nothing beyond this plane of existence, then maybe dying and no longer existing has to be punishment enough." Just a thought, but it's also an incentive to stay alive as long as possible and help others to do the same.
The final trick, or temptation, in Hell turns out to be a stairway leading out of the underworld, only there's a bridge over the eternal fires to get to the stairway, and the bridge is broken. This seems like a final test of character, because only the most arrogant person brought to Hell would think that they don't really belong there, like there must have been some mistake made (ironic for someone who also believes in the infallibility of God) or that they're clever enough to find a loophole in the laws of eternal damnation. If the choices are to be punished forever in the 7th circle of Hell, or risk everything by trying to get to the stairway, what do you think Jack chooses, based on the type of person he is?
NITPICK POINT: Jack is also some kind of architect or engineer, but though he was very hung up on the difference between them, it still wasn't very clear to me. And he's apparently been trying several times to build his "dream house", has started the build a few times and then scrapped the project, for reasons that were also unclear. Was this another OCD thing, and if not, what forced him to stop construction and start over? Unclear, unclear, unclear.
NITPICK POINT #2: In the first incident, Jack drives the woman with car trouble to a place where she can get her jack fixed. If he did have the intention to help her (this scene was possibly set before his killing spree began) wouldn't it make more sense to drive her to a service station, or an auto repair shop, some place that could, you know, genuinely help her? This felt very contrived, or perhaps the director doesn't understand how car repair works?
Also starring Matt Dillon (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Uma Thurman (last seen in "Movie 43"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Sofie Grabol, Riley Keough (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Jeremy Davies (last seen in "Dogville"), Jack McKenzie (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Mathias Hjelm, Ed Speelers (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Marijana Jankovic, Carina Skenhede, Rocco Day (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Cohen Day, Robert Jezek, Osy Ikhile (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Robert G. Slade, Vasilije Mujka, Emil Tholstrup, with archive footage of Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini (last seen in "Vice"), Joseph Stalin (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Albert Speer, Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (last seen in "Norman"), Glenn Gould, Udo Kier (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Emily Watson (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle")
RATING: 3 out of 10 frozen pizzas
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