The Kingdom: Exodus – Lars Von Trier at his dementedly mischievous best

While most of you have been going about your advent business, some of us have been enjoying the most unsettling Christmas movie of all time. That’s not quite true. The concluding section of Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom may have premiered at the Venice Film Festival, but its episodic quality somewhat strains that definition. We were nonetheless watching a great late work by the most irritating, brilliant, frustrating filmmaker of the era. And one with Christmas hats.

It is hard to avoid comparisons with Twin Peaks: The Return. The first two series of The Kingdom, emerging in 1994 and 1997, were, like the David Lynch show, marinated in cask-strength absurdity. Von Trier and his collaborators come back to their work after a similarly enormous gap. But the Danish series is scuzzier, mustier and altogether less at home to subversive grace.

The series concerned a hospital, built on the site of ancient bleaching ponds, where endless weirdness winds in with endless provocation. Dishwashers with Down syndrome act as a sort of chorus. A doctor contrives to have a diseased liver transplanted into his own body. And so in the style of Von Trier.

The concluding five episodes that have been dropping on the Mubi service over the last month maintain the bleak humour while upping the meta-textual larks (the original show seems to exists in this universe) and adding a new poignancy to the morbid humour.

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Over the last year, Von Trier confirmed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and explained that he was stepping away from filmmaking. The show was, as a horrible haunted version of the contemporaneous ER, always concerned with illness, but the sequence where one character explains a Chinese custom – maybe made-up, who knows – of allowing people to live the end of their lives in an opium den feels particularly resonant. A sort of grim reaper makes a late prancing appearance.

Then again, almost everything Von Trier does, even when deathly serious, is some sort of a joke. Indeed, he is, perhaps, at his most jocular when at his most earnest. Boasting diverting, angular performances from the likes of Willem Dafoe and Lars Mikkelsen, The Kingdom: Exodus is mischievousness on a dementedly grand scale. There is nobody quite like him.