Mar 14, 2014

The Kingdom

Saw The Kingdom, a Danish show by Lars Von Trier, known for such delights as Melancholia, Dancer in the Dark, and Antichrist. The show follows the adventures of a bunch of doctors and patients in a haunted hospital. It's weird and grim and deeply comic. It's also the funniest thing I've seen come out of Von Trier. The end of season one has the minister of public health coming across all of the different, wild threads of the various plots all in one ridiculous night. He finds a secret liver-transplant operation, a secret birth, and a full-blown exorcism. To us viewers, these threads have been slowly and logically developing, but he rightly denounces the hospital as a madhouse. There's also a lot of comedy to be had from the villainous and extremely nationalistic Swedish Doctor Helmer. He's just so evilly and ineffectually conniving and so absurdly disdainful of Denmark (and is therefore the butt of many jokes.)

The show starts out with a Lost-type feel of a mystery that will be explained slowly but surely. We have the ghost of a little girl who was perhaps murdered, the Swedish doctor to corral, a ghost-ambulance which appears every night. Alas, in the second season, one doctor gives birth to a grotesquely huge baby and it turns out The (or A) Devil is behind all the bedlam and the series starts to lose its mind. It's a fun trip while it lasts and I feel a bit sorry that there wasn't a third season, but the series was clearly sliding into ridiculousness by the end.

It is fairly entertaining however, and I think this is Lars at his most pandering and commercial. He doesn't completely suppress his interest in exotic images and eerie situations (the first time a ghost is shown is amazing) but it's a lot closer to tame than usual. (Chaos, for good or ill, never exactly reigns.)

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