Lars von Trier’s notorious torture of his actresses taken to its most visceral, literal, obvious extreme, the director’s The House That Jack Built sees Matt Dillon brutally murdering the likes of Uma Thurman and Riley Keough. The film casts Dillon as a serial killer (prescription aviators, creepy mustache and all) who ponders whether “the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization.” And in case that’s all a bit too subtle for you, the thriller also intercuts hungry tigers with Dillon and innocent lambs with his victims. Von Trier apparently studied the Naked Gun 2½ school of visual metaphor.
The House That Jack Built debuts today at Cannes.
