The House That Jack Built

"Notorious provocateur Lars von Trier is up to his old tricks with the savage but fascinatingly ambitious serial killer drama The House That Jack Built. Critic Sarah Ward attended the film's Australian premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival."

"Haters gonna hate, and von Trier gonna von Trier as hard as he can. That should give you some gauge as to whether you should bail from The House That Jack Built right now. For this smugly self-aware, nonetheless arrestingly idiosyncratic, magnum-opus-wannabe finds the controversy-baiting poster boy of auteurist arthouse navel-gazing venturing further down the path of no return as his widening circle of detractors cry, not without good reason, “Don’t feed the troll!”."

"It's halfway between a subversive good movie and a stunt. It's designed to get under your skin, and does."

"An empty provocation, The House That Jack Built aims for profundity but achieves only mild queasiness."

"Two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald's warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much."

"An ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared."

"If this shrill, manipulative, sledge-hammer allegory is right for our times, give me Dante any day. Von Trier has certainly done better, but never worse."

"This felt something like I endured, rather than enjoyed."

"The House That Jack Built is definitely something to see. But what's most surprising is that it's just as often inane as unsettling."

"It can happily sit among the ranks of extreme cinema like Cannibal Holocaust, Salo and A Serbian Film as movies very few people will be able to sit all the way through, much less enjoy."