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The scene of elaborate destruction we build to is entirely predictable if you know anything whatsoever about the architect-turned-serial-killer narrative or the filmmaker. Because it is the centerpiece of the film, its soul, it satisfies when it emerges, but we glimpse it only for a second, as if von Trier himself were bored by the only moment of ingenuity he's conjured in nearly a decade.

Danish prankster Lars Von Trier’s day has come. His career-long attempt at dismantling film art finally matches the cultural moment in The House That Jack Built. Von Trier taints a foundational nursery rhyme — debasing its formerly innocent traditions — which leads to his most potent spiritual commentary.

Has there ever been a flimsier approximation of all that necessary “filler” than in The House That Jack Built? Nothing has any illusionistic weight in this film.

It’s far from the first time that von Trier has sent his audience on a downward spiral into hell, but it is the film that best expresses his reasons for doing so. And because Lars isn’t just a provocateur, never one to shock his audience and distance himself from it with a sense of righteousness (hello, Michael Haneke), it is also his most bashful admission of guilt, fear, and regret as an artist.

Von Trier seems genuinely to overstepped some limit. He’s gone too far in the extremity of the content, all the more unpleasant because of the tone of drab ruefulness that attends the whole event (as if he’s constantly saying, “I shouldn’t be doing this, should I? And don’t think I don’t hate myself for it”). But he’s also gone too far in making such a bloated, laborious, earnest bore of a film.

The polyphony of discourse that arises from this unstable linkage of author and text—which is at times ugly, contradictory, and even downright obscene—is what provides the film with its animating tension and uniquely disconcerting power.

The movie is missing the clarity of vision to whip psychopathology into something rousingly intellectual. It fails to make depravity an experience that either stimulates or appalls. If I wanted to leave von Trier’s movie, it wasn’t because I was nauseous.

I don’t think that von Trier is actually an extreme rightist, or any kind of ideologue, but, rather, that he’s a casual provocateur whose flip, adolescent café-table musings about the nature of art and the art of nature are as simplistically shocking as his gory and sadistic drama.

It arrived as a viewer-testing orgy of extreme thrills, but it’s actually a very late-period-auteur movie which continues Von Trier’s longtime formal gambit (a widescreen, performance-foregrounding and conspicuously handheld camera style, courting utilitarian ugliness, interpolated with bits reminding you he can go hyper-formal at will) while self-reflexively reorganizing his general preoccupations.

A bloated 160 minutes long, often dull, at times mordant, at times offensive, and at times extremely silly . . . The House That Jack Built is far from perfect, but it is von Trier’s most interesting work in a long time. . . . It's a somewhat twisted provocation consciously constructed by the filmmaker to respond to his critics, and one that comes across as a kind of last testament

Although von Trier has been known to be more cinematically ambitious, his film is far more complex than the unguarded outburst of a woman-hating chauvinist it has been painted as, and its epilogue (“Katabasis”), showing Virgil and Jack’s descent into the inferno, is as visually inventive a use of CGI imagery as I have seen.

Duly trolled, most reviewers responded with predictable indignation while failing to register the singular tone of this intractable object, part middle finger and part mea culpa, at once self-implicating and self-immolating, both a critique and a defense of problematic art and bad taste, the hopelessly incorrect credo of an artist fully committing to his megalomanic, misanthropic, and masochistic tendencies.