the kingdom come

At six hours long, The Kingdom is the kind of movie you provision for.

I first saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival – on a fluke. After several hours of deliberation with my then-husband over the SIFF schedule, I was dispatched to buy the tickets (I usually got the chores – it was our way) with our preciously spare cash supply. Standing in line (this was in the dark days, before e-commerce penetration) reviewing the schedule again, The Kingdom caught my eye. It was sold as a block the tickets that spanned two sequential nights; three-hour screenings each.

I didn’t know about Lars von Trier then, and the genre – horror – was one that I usually avoided, if only because too many filmmakers make slashers and call them horror films (which is not the same thing, folks).

It wasn’t on our agreed-upon list, but I went ahead and bought a block of tickets. B looked at me like I was a nut when I got home and explained the purchase to him, but he dragged his ass along anyway.

It was either the fact that it was shot for Danish television in video format, or that it was shot by von Trier, that made for an incredibly grainy projection at Seattle’s Egyptian Theater – but I was hooked from the get go. As was the rest of the audience that night (I love it when an audience gets behind a film and gets noisy – in all the right places). Even B enjoyed it enough to forget that it was my idea in the first place (that was also our way).

Great characters, convoluted plot, plenty of gotchas. The kind of movie that lives with you for awhile afterwards and subverts your perception of everything that used to be normal.

But hey, what do I know? The effusive Sumez over at IMDb says it better than I ever could:

One of the best horror movies ever!
To me, this was the production that made Lars von Trier stand out as an extraordinary movie director and the movie, that finally pushed the Danish movie scene in the right direction!

It sort of founded the modern Danish dogma/dogme inspired movie style with its grainy colours, rash use of cutting and camera movement as well as strange, yet very realistic acting. All used to develop the perfect atmosphere around a good horror movie! There is just one thing you must remember when watching Riget/The Kingdom. It is a movie. It is entertainment. It is no comedy, yet nothing in the movie is serious. It uses sick and sometimes just weird ways of building up the horror. It doesn't have to make sense.

A lot of people may not like this because it is typically Danish, which may easily frustrate anyone who is only used to high budget Hollywood movies. The not-so-obvious deeper meaning between the lines as well as all the bold and underlined lines that have no meaning at all could confuse certain minds, but if you are prepared for a bunch of self-irony and sweet horror scenes, and if you like writers/directors such as David Lynch and Chris Carter, you are going to love this!

It is nice to see that mentally freaked out horror movies didn't die out with The Exorcist, and this definitely isn't any worse!

Plus it won the Golden Spaceneedle Award at that year's festival: And what better validation could there be than receiving a golden pointed Googie object?

Highly recommended with Halloween coming.

p.s. Speaking of film festivals – Chicago’s opens on October 5th.