The Kingdom II (1997)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Kingdom II (1997) – L. Von Trier

I watched the first series of Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, a surreal horror comedy set in a Danish hospital, in the late ‘90s.  I couldn’t remember too much except that it ended with a baby being born with the giant head of Udo Kier on it and also that it was pretty all over the place in its wacky horror tropes (voodoo, ghosts, severed heads).  St. Elsewhere on acid, I guess.  So, when I finally ran across the second series (filmed in 1997), I wasn’t too concerned about returning to the plot close to twenty years later.  I figured I would let it just wash over me again.  Fortunately, there was a minute of “recap” at the start of the fifth episode – just enough to remember some of the characters – and then the over-the-top nonsense continued.  More or less, the denizens of the hospital are fools for denying the supernatural/spiritual/alternative side of reality, particularly because the hospital is beset by demons (led by Udo Kier himself).  With a low budget, lots of jump cuts, and more restraint than you might expect, Von Trier manages to create a compelling multi-character soap opera that wants to take itself seriously at the same time as it does not.  You have to take the good with the evil, as he says at the end of each episode (he’s the host, a la Hitchcock).  The most shocking thing of all, however, is that the series ends with another set of cliff-hangers and, as it turns out, Von Trier never got to make the third series as some of the lead actors passed away.  So, instead of finding closure for the open narrative that I left hanging a decade or two ago, I’ve now got a loose end that will never ever get tied up.