July 23–30, 1998

movie shorts

The Kingdom II

recommended

When last we left the cast of Lars von Trier's surreal epic The Kingdom, a doctor had had a cancerous liver transplanted into himself, a group of troubled spirits had escaped through a hole in a basement wall, and a woman was in the process of giving birth to what looked like a full-grown man. That's how things are at The Kingdom, the Copenhagen hospital built on the site of ancient ritual practices, where a conflict has arisen between the forces of good and evil, a conflict which medical science finds itself powerless to understand. Von Trier, the director of Breaking the Waves and Zentropa, conceived The Kingdom as a 12-part series for Danish TV, to be filmed in four-episode chunks. A congenital wiseass and enfant terrible, Von Trier can't seem to suppress a smirk for the length of his more serious works. The Kingdom's mixture of screwball comedy and horrific ghost story draws on his best strengths. Like any middle part of a trilogy, Part II seems a little too functional at times, wrapping up loose ends from Part I and setting up the series' ultimate climax. And the tonal balance seems a little off this time; too much wackiness and not enough horror, which leaves things feeling a little inconsequential. Still, there's no way you've ever seen anything remotely like this before, and Von Trier's mad ambition and manic energy make for consistently invigorating filmmaking in whatever he does. If you haven't seen Part I, don't worry; I-House will have cheat sheets on hand to catch you up on the relevant points, and nobody really understands what's going on anyway.

—Sam Adams