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

Strange things are happening in the underbelly of a Danish hospital. The anguished spirit of a young girl can be heard crying in the elevator shafts, as a phantom ambulance hurtles through the streets of Copenhagen every night. Secret societies convene in the basement, while staff congregate in the nondescript wards, so caught up in their own petty grievances they remain oblivious to the demonic awakening set to shake the very building to its core.

The Kingdom I inaugurates Lars von Trier’s magnum opus, a cult TV phenomenon three decades in the making. Described by the director as “a ghost story spiced up with a few soap-like elements,” the series is Denmark’s answer to Twin Peaks: a compulsively entertaining supernatural mystery, charged with potent melodrama and populated with a recurring cast of endearing eccentrics.

When the four episodes comprising The Kingdom I aired on Danish television in 1994, von Trier had already made something of a reputation for himself at home with his “Europe” trilogy (1984-1991), the last film of which saw him win the Jury Prize in Cannes. But it was The Kingdom which made him a household name, not least due to his mischievously enigmatic sign-offs during the credits of each installment. The filmmaker who would soon become synonymous with artistic provocation showed little interest in tempering his creative idiosyncrasies for the broader demographics of a television audience, breaking with the refined formalism of his earlier features for a handheld style that would anticipate the faux-documentary likes of The Office and von Trier’s own Dogme 95 manifesto. “We did all kinds of things to make it look terrible,” he said, impishly, of The Kingdom’s rust-colored 16mm cinematography, now beautifully restored in never-before-seen versions of each episode.

An incomparable blend of workplace comedy and nail-biting ghost story, The Kingdom I pitches science against superstition in unholy conflict. The ultimate battle may be fought between the forces of darkness and light, but von Trier keeps the boundaries between the two ambiguous, hilariously ensnaring each and every character in the quicksand of their own vanity. Like most of von Trier’s work, it’s a series of fascinating dualities, summed up by the director in his sign-off to each and every episode: “Be prepared to take the good with the evil.”