Always flamboyantly combative, Lars von Trier gets up to serious mischief in The Kingdom. The humor in this series, like the viciousness in his other work, rises from his unwavering faith that all humans are gluttons for punishment at heart. Like Brecht, von Trier is ostensibly cruel to us for our own good; unlike Brecht, his intentions are neither political nor enumerated. He refuses to reveal what the stick up his ass is made of. From his implementation of actual gore (footage from real surgeries) to his risqué characterization (a chorus of psychic teenage dishwashers with Down’s syndrome) to his on-camera appearances, heckling the audience after each episode, the spoonful of sugar accompanying von Trier’s measured obnoxiousness is bad-boy charm. And despite the invective in his arsenal (“Maybe you think the story is predictable and depressing. If so, look at your own life... enjoy the comfort of the familiar.”), the beady-eyed Dane does has some gems to bestow—patiently—on the subject of modern death.

Filmed at Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet (literally Kingdom Hospital, Riget for short), the four-part haunted hospital drama revisits many themes in von Trier’s ’87 Epidemic: ungainly Good Doctors, encroaching evil, disease, hypnosis, and the curious origins of Udo Kier. Again, von Trier claws eloquently at the intersection of pathology per se and pathology as metaphor. As one surgeon explains to his class of medical students prior to a dissection:

“The fear of being touched, of getting close to others, is the fear of death. Why? Because it is the fear of the fellowship... Every time you move along the seat on the bus to avoid contact, every time you avoid poking your fingers into a patient’s illness, it’s fear of that greater fellowship. Everyone we work on down here has accepted his place in the fellowship. A corpse makes no demands. With sublime generosity a corpse delivers its body to the science that belongs to all of us.”

He’s right about the fear thing; our instinctual distaste for contact with strangers, like our frequent inability to maintain eye contact, is symptomatic of the denial of death necessary for human survival (see also Don Delillo’s novel White Noise). But he’s wrong otherwise; at this particular hospital, corpses do make demands.

Friction between science and the occult gradually turns the Kingdom into the laughing stock of Denmark; medical inquest is ground to a halt and mysticism takes command. In a Leland Palmer-like development, the head neurosurgeon spontaneously authors a PR campaign he calls “Operation Morning Breeze,” and then spends most of his time designing its sunshine-and-stick-figures logo. Meanwhile, a Masonic Lodge draws up fishy plans for obtaining cancerous organs for research, Haitian zombies haunt the Sleep Lab, and an old woman develops grandmotherly affections toward a weepy apparition in the elevator.

Both the special effects (pssst! CGI) and primary storyline (child-ghost-in-the-machine seeks revenge) have an unfortunate J-Horror quality (Although it wasn’t released for another four years, Ringu forever stymied my sympathy with undead tweens…give them some goddamn Benadryl already!). The Kingdom really shines in its subplots, which are so numerous, so audacious and riveting, that I’m forced to forgive stray cheese in the narrative. Writer Niels Vørsel’s hysterical dialogue and the director’s flair for ironic detail are genuinely humbling. Each installment concludes with Lars’ disclaimer, “if you’re going to visit The Kingdom, you must prepare to take the good with the evil.” And you know what? Condescension never felt so good.
—LEAH CHURNER