The story goes that Lars von Trier came up with the idea for his bizarre Danish TV show, The Kingdom, which ran for two 4-episode seasons in 1994 and 1997, after watching Twin Peaks, which makes perfect sense. Just as David Lynch was, in the 80s and early 90s, the most dauntingly original filmmaker in the U.S., whether you’re talking indie or Hollywood, von Trier was becoming his cognate in Europe. But while Lynch’s iconoclastic approach was almost purely a matter of artistic expression, von Trier’s included an element of willful provocation. This difference was especially evident in the two TV shows, both of which took certain serial formulas—for Lynch, the police procedural, for Von Trier, the hospital-set soap opera—and added subtexts in the occult and alternative cosmologies. Both also used humor to disarming effect, but Lynch’s jokes were gentler, more idiosyncratic, while von Triers’s were cruel and absurd—in other words, willfully provocative. 

It’s thus natural to assume that Lynch’s 2017 revival, Twin Peaks: The Return, was the impetus for von Trier to make The Kingdom Exodus, which was initially broadcast on Danish TV last year, but it should be noted that the second season of The Kingdom did not end with a satisfactory resolution almost 25 years ago. In fact, part of the underlying motivation for the plot in Exodus is that the main character, Karen Svensson (Bodil Jørgensen), an elderly woman living alone, has just finished watching Season 2 on DVD and, perplexed by the lack of closure, leaves her house by taxi and goes to the titular hospital to find out what happened to Sigrid Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes), who, like Karen, was a sleepwalker whose condition made it easier for her to commune with the spirits that haunted the place. The origin story, recounted at the beginning of every episode, is that the hospital was built on the site of an ancient bleaching pond that also contained unsettled souls of the dead, and the theme of the series is how the technocrats who built and now run the institution deny the existence of a spiritual realm at their own peril. That explanation is deceptively high-minded, because The Kingdom is a singularly ridiculous series whose use of doctor and horror cliches is tangential to its mission to deride both the medical profession and creepy TV shows. 

As far as the former mission goes, von Trier doesn’t hold back at all. The physicians who work at Copenhagen’s Kingdom Hospital (a nickname, not its real name) range from the dangerously paranoid to the even more dangerously self-important and arrogant. The subtheme of bitter antagonisms between Danes and Swedes is continued in Season 3 with the arrival of Dr. Helmer (Mikael Persbrandt), the son of Stig Helmer in the original series, a Swede who hated Danes with a spitting passion. Junior has not only inherited that enmity, but taken a job at the Kingdom for the express purpose of finding out how his late father was driven insane—and to find out where he is buried. Von Trier ups the ante on this cross-Scandinavian hate campaign by making fun of Volvos and IKEA, and then creating a secret society of Swedish expat workers called Swedes Anonymous, which includes program details of AA, thus suggesting that being Swedish is a kind of sickness. Certainly the cleverest offshoot of this idea is having Alexander Skarsgård play an on-site Swedish lawyer (his office is in a stall in the ladies room) who represents both sides in a sexual assault case between two Swedish parties. Nevertheless, the Danes match them idiocy for idiocy. Head of surgery, Dr. Pontopidan (Lars Mikkelsen), avoids contact with his colleagues at all costs and runs meetings, conferences, and even ORs as if he were trying desperately to make them fail so as not to require his services ever again. Helmer’s Danish counterpart, Dr. Naver (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), spends his working days in a constant state of rage, telling jokes in atrociously bad taste and occasionally making good on his threat to scoop out his eyeball with a teaspoon. 

In terms of horror, Exodus is slighter than the two previous seasons, as if von Trier couldn’t really be bothered. Udo Kier returns as Little Brother, the abominable man-child born of a neurosurgeon (Birgitte Raaberg, one of the few actors reprised from the original two seasons) and which has grown into a giant whose vital organs now intertwine with the infrastructure of the Kingdom. There’s also a puckish Willem Dafoe as an agent of Satan who runs around the hospital causing all sorts of mischief, and various lesser ghouls who pop in-and-out of the story for no discernible reason. Suffice to say that while there is more of a resolution here than there was at the end of Season 2, it’s so laughably meta that Karen would likely find it even more of an insult, but most viewers who will want to see The Kingdom Exodus will probably be watching because all three seasons show off von Trier’s uniquely acerbic humor much more successfully than his feature films do, and the guy is nothing if not relentless in his lampooning of finer sensibilities. (Note: the theatrical version opening in Tokyo is five hours long.) If you want prestige TV, look elsewhere. Von Trier has no patience for the structural mandates of conventional serial storytelling, but Exodus is, in many ways, more purely entertaining than The Return was. In order to enjoy it, however, you’ll require a strong stomach for emotionally stunted human beings with horrible grooming habits. 

In Danish and Swedish. Now playing in Tokyo once a day (special admission price) at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Kingdom Exodus home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Viaplay Group, Dr & Zentropa Entertainments2 APS