‘The Kingdom: Exodus’ Review: Lars Von Trier Is Down With The Sickness In Revived Hospital Comedy Series [Venice]

Lurching unnaturally back to life nearly twenty years after Lars von Trier first plumbed the depths of madness contained within Copenhagen’s Rigethospitalet, “The Kingdom: Exodus” has returned, now swarming with ghosts. The five new episodes serve as a continuation of the auteur’s ‘90s-era surreal gallows comedy while looking inward, making conversation with its own past as well as the sinister penumbra of history itself. Aside from the malevolent spirits converging on the hospital due to its location atop the former site of hellacious “bleaching ponds,” characters from the original run reappear in altered forms as if through a perverse form of reincarnation. Sleepwalker Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) heeds the call from a spectral little girl that once haunted a patient much like herself. The doctor Helmer Jr. (Mikael Persbrandt) replaces his father, mocked by the rest of the staff with the nickname “Halmer,” as in “half a Helmer.” A pair of mentally disabled dishwashers who served as a wry Greek chorus have ceded their positions to a young man with progeria (Jesper Sørensen, a comic marvel) and an insubordinate robot. The introduction of automation is one of the only signs of modernity that permeates the building’s enclosure of insanity, in which it often seems as if time stands still.

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In all of the aforementioned cases, new cast members have taken over for actors who have passed away in the interim decades, their performances both temporal tampering and tacit tribute. The resultant combination of deja vu and extreme poignancy is strange yet familiar, in that aficionados of long-form bizarreness such as this last felt it with “Twin Peaks: The Return.” The long shadow of David Lynch looms tallest over von Trier’s small-screen work, and not just in the pseudo-Badalamenti score and all of the sudden vanishing/re-materialization and the owls that aren’t what they seem. They share an ambition to build a complex, enveloping universe oriented around a singular ideal of evil, a gnarled, pulsating heart of darkness made literal when, in “Exodus,” it’s revealed to be attached to the gigantic head of Udo Kier.

In the hectic ecosystem of the Rigethospitalet — rendered once again in fetus-formaldehyde sepia, with grain dialed up to the max — grotty absurdities transpire around every corner. The queasy Dutch-angled camera wanders the halls, drifting through self-contained subplots that allow von Trier to condense disparate commentaries into surprisingly well-structured installments. (It’s a laugh that a visitor from the feature-length Euro circuit has a better handle on hourlong pacing than the hordes of American indie directors and TV veterans who have let their style be subsumed by the cranking-out of streaming miniseries.) Most of the shenanigans concern the comical differences between Danes and Swedes, from an inspired running gag about hubcap theft prevention to a clandestine Swedes Anonymous meeting. There’s also room for some collar-pull-worthy satire on cancel culture in a C-plot concerning accusations of sexual harassment and the legal counsel of the in-house lawyer (Alexander Skarsgard, taking over for his dad Stellan) working out of the basement bathroom. Every now and then, an emissary of Satan (Willem Dafoe, which is what we call “type casting” in the biz) pops in to deliver some of the most chilling facial acting since Conrad Veidt stared a hole through “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

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The sitcom-adjacent emphasis on levity, even more pronounced than in the droll sadism of “The House That Jack Built,” does nothing to detract from the noxious vibes radiating out of every single scene. One of the most vocally tormented artists on the face of the Earth still transmutes his inner agony into his material, most pointedly with one episode’s A-plot about a prestigious Pain Congress that sees white-lab-coat types academically debating the utility of excruciation. Von Trier places metatextual self-interrogations like this front and center while simultaneously shying away from their implications with turns into the strange or silly, always one step ahead of our attempts to make sense of him; in the end credit sequence, rather than addressing the viewers directly as he did in the original, he now stands behind a curtain with only his shoes sticking out.  

Von Trier occupies the same position as The Wizard of Oz, and the reverent secondhand Lynchisms would suggest that he knows it. But this lineage of homage comes through most strongly in the overall atmosphere of dreams, a pervasive non-reality that is at turns wondrous and terrifying, banal and miraculous. The elasticity of what’s possible under these oneiric conditions turns the hospital into an organism unto itself, stuck in a state of suspended decomposition as it hangs between blood-hemorrhaging life and phantom-plagued death. Equal parts madhouse and funhouse, the setting isn’t like a character — it is one. If this be the site of a hangout show, it wants to swallow the viewer and hold them in its malicious limbo for eternity. That we can’t stick around forever, that the sprawling five-hour run time is still as finite as the lives of its former stars, forms the core of tragedy underlying the sickness. [A-]

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