There are plenty of films you wish you hadn't wasted time on. Films you regret having seen at all are something else. Formerly a regular here, Lars von Trier has been persona non grata at Cannes film festival since 2011, when he joked at a press conference about sympathizing with the Nazis.
He has been allowed back this year although not into competition. "Whether we like it or not, we are dealing with a great film and a great filmmaker”, insists the festival's artistic director, Thierry Fremaux.
A great film this is not. Jack (Matt Dillon) is a handsome, clever, heartless psychopath and serial killer of more than 60 people. As the film opens he is describing his life, through five murders or chapters, to an unseen interlocutor, "Verge" (lugubrious Bruno Ganz) - Virgil, making Jack into Dante, being accompanied down to the underworld.
First we see Jack murder an annoying woman (Uma Thurman) who wants help with a flat tyre, hitting her with a tyre jack, as though she were asking for it. Next he strangles and stabs a widow (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), whom he has spotted walking along the road, dragging her mutilated body behind his van to his walk-in freezer, where he stores his victims. Then it's a trusting mother (Sofie Grabel) and her two children, shot, as if they were game.
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Then it is a dumb girlfriend, "Simple", (Riley Keogh), breasts cut off. Lastly, he plans to shoot a row of men he has cuffed in line to an iron-bar in his freezer, through the head, with a single full metal jacket bullet from his rifle, in tribute to those ingenious Nazis. But the police finally catch up with him and "Verge" arrives to conduct him to a suitably distinguished punishment.
Jack has meanwhile been building himself a house on a pretty lakeside plot (the film is supposedly set in America, but only token attempts are made to disguise its Danish location), repeatedly tearing it down in dissatisfaction with the materials. Before he descends to the inferno, he has time to make himself a natty little house in his freezer from the perfect material, all the frozen corpses: Jack's house.
Jack, who calls himself "Mr Sophistication", thinks that he is creating art through his murders and alludes to Blake's The Tyger and The Lamb, saying they're both perfect and necessary and "the lamb has been bestowed the honour of living forever in art". But this has no more value than the tasteless allusions to Buchenwald, Nazi architecture, the beauty of the Stuka, "noble rot" in sweet wines and corpses, Glenn Gould yet again and Von Trier's own back catalogue.
The film – made with the inquisitive weaving camera once supposed to embody "Dogme" integrity – wants only to provoke, to shock, to disgust. It achieves the latter.