THE CLASSIC ORIGINAL SERIES FROM LARS VON TRIER, RESTORED AND REMASTERED

It took three years for The Kingdom II to reach Danish television screens back in 1997, which must have felt like an eternity for audiences left slack-jawed at the first season’s cliffhanger finale. As we join them in the immediate aftermath, our motley crew of physicians and administrators are still squabbling among themselves, unaware of the profound evil rising from the bowels of Copenhagen’s favorite haunted hospital.

Between seasons, Lars von Trier’s star had continued to rise with the release of Breaking the Waves (1996), an epic melodrama that won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and secured an Oscar® nomination for its lead actress, Emily Watson. In deciding how to follow a work local critics described as “the greatest Danish film of the century,” von Trier returned to familiar territory, further enriching the mythologies of his cult TV phenomenon.

The Kingdom II sees the filmmaker embrace more fully the leisurely pleasures of episodic television, layering set-ups to gags that often only pay off in later installments. If the first season felt more self-contained as a horror-mystery, here von Trier leans further into soap opera territory, albeit with an inimitably jagged style clearly refined over the course of the first season and through the making of Breaking the Waves.

The entire Kingdom project finds its heart and soul in the magnificent Udo Kier. Playing multiple roles, the cult icon embodies von Trier’s philosophical dichotomies, at once the personification of good and evil. Such dualities extend to the series’ masterful tonal shifts, as it moves nimbly between exhilarating farce and poignant pathos. Von Trier keeps an impending sense of dread on a rolling simmer, en route to another startling finale. Perhaps the Greek chorus of dishwashers in the hospital basement offer the best description of this superlative sequel season: “It starts as foolishness, but ends as evilness!”