WHILE Danish writer/director Lars von Trier’s films do not seek to milk the populist box-office cow, they have collected many awards (the Wikipedia main article about him is easily accessible).

This long (152 minutes) film accompanying Jack (Matt Dillon) during 12 years of madness, death, art, cruelty and murder is not comfortable cinema.

Jack is an architect-cum-engineer of independent means who lives alone and eschews friendships. Jack kills people he doesn’t know for reasons that he alone understands.

Von Trier films the murders in exquisite detail. He’s not setting out to titillate weirdos in the audience who become serial killers because they can. The murderings are driven by Jack’s views of ethics, art, philosophy, religion and morality. Von Trier is not the only well-regarded filmmaker whose violent films explore those themes. Think Bunuel, Pasolini, even Hitchcock; perhaps not Tarantino. In the graphic arts, violent death is a frequent theme.

“The House That Jack Built” is a polemic of von Trier’s views about life in our time, in the US. It’s macabre. It’s disturbing. While it gives only scant attention to sex, a strong sense of sexual malaise pervades it. Late in the film, when Jack wants one full-metal-jacket round of rifle ammunition to test how many skulls it will penetrate before its energy dissipates, he pays cash to a seedy gun shop owner with banknotes drawn from a purse made from a breast sliced from a woman (Riley Keough) whose intelligence he despises. He preserves his victims in an industrial deep freeze.

The film introduces a commentary from the initially unseen Verge (the great German actor Bruno Ganz who died less than a month ago) who, after Jack has constructed a house from materials that most interest him and of which he has accumulated a goodly supply, appears to confront him and lead him to the edge of what is commonly considered to be hell. It gives the film an optimistic conclusion. But not too optimistic.

After opening in the US on December 16, with an estimated budget of $13 million, “The House That Jack Built” earned only $123,000 in its first month. As Robbie Burns wrote after seeing a flea on a lady’s bonnet in church: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!”

At Dendy