By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
Undeniably clunky plotpoint aside – and it is, admittedly, a pretty major one that’s hard to miss – The Kingdom Exodus is otherwise a playful, spooky and at times genuinely moving return.”
With the passing of legendary Swedish actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård in 1998, Lars von Trier said he’d never return to his cult hospital-set television series Kingdom in which Järegård starred again. Well, never say never – if nothing else, von Trier has established somewhat of a brand of being full of shit. And while fans of the original two-season series which ran from 1994 to 1997 likewise struggled to imagine a Kingdom without Järegård’s incandescently irritable head of neurosurgery Stig Helmer, 25 years is a long time – long enough, it seems, for von Trier to reimaging the series from the ground up. Like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (a series von Trier has openly cited as an influence) the addition of a third series a quarter of a century later is a welcome return for Kingdom’s dedicated international fan base.
And it does not disappoint. Along with Järegård, we have also lost the heart of the first two series of Kingdom, the late great Kirsten Rolffes who played the kindly psychic Sigrid Drusse whose investigations exposed the dark supernatural horrors at the heart of the hospital’s history. Here, she’s replaced with Karen, played by the always delightful Bodil Jørgensen. This casting alone is a special treat for von Trier enthusiasts, who no doubt remember her fondly from her starring role in his confrontational 1998 film The Idiots.
Hinging on a metatextual twist, the third series begins as Karen sits in her small home watching the end of Kingdom’s second season. Clearly disturbed by something, she goes to bed with a bell tied around her neck and strapped to her bed, neither of which stop her sleepwalking. Getting up and leaving her home, she finds a taxi waiting for her outside to take her to Kingdom Hospital. Walking through the doors, the colour palette changes dramatically to the toxic yellow that marked the earlier series, and we are home. When she asks to see Sigrid, a weary security guard tells her something he has clearly told many before her: Frau Drusse is a fictional character, a creation we are told of that “idiot Trier”. Regardless, Karen pushes on, driven by her compulsion to heed the call of Udo Kier’s iconic Little Brother, the enormous half-human half-phantom born so spectacularly in the gruesome final moments of series one.
While the bulk of season three is as joyous and outrageous as those which preceded it, it is sadly weighed down by a frankly weird, tonally skewiff plotline starring Alexander Skarsgard about falsified sexual harassment claims played for comedic effect.”
As we venture into the Kingdom Hospital with Karen, we find old friends and make new ones as the dark secrets of the past seep into the present and hurtle towards the “exodus” of the third series title which will see the departure of the hospital’s many spirits – both good and evil – by Christmastime.
Familiar but aged faces from the earlier series include Søren Pilmark as Hook, Ghita Nørby as Rigmor, Laura Christensen as Mona Jensen, Peter Mygind as Moesgaard, and Birgitte Raaberg as Judith, with new characters played by a wonderful Lars Mikkelsen and Tuva Novotny. Jens Okking’s oafish and lovable hospital porter Bulder from the original wo series is here reincarnated in the look-alike (and sound-alike) Balder, played to adorable perfection by the great Nicolas Bro, while Willem Dafoe reaches excessive new heights in his extraordinary cameo as Beezlebub himself.
While the bulk of season three is as joyous and outrageous as those which preceded it, it is sadly weighed down by a frankly weird, tonally skewiff plotline starring Alexander Skarsgard about falsified sexual harassment claims played for comedic effect. It’s hard not to see this as a thinly disguised and inescapably icky reference to the #MeToo fallout that saw significant allegations made against both Peter Aalbæk Jensen – co-founder with von Trier of the production company Zentropa – and von Trier himself, the latter by Icelandic musician Björk who won a Best Actress award at Cannes in 2000 for her starring role in von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.
This undeniably clunky plotpoint aside – and it is, admittedly, a pretty major one that’s hard to miss – The Kingdom Exodus (which recently played at the Melbourne International Film Festival) is otherwise a playful, spooky and at times genuinely moving return. Von Trier’s series is historically an important one; while the original series was clearly inspired by Twin Peaks, at the same time it of course predated the awkward workplace humour of pioneering British sitcoms The Office and I’m Alan Partridge both by a good number of years. And while it is delightful to see the return of so many familiar faces from the earlier seasons, it is perhaps only fitting that it is von Trier himself – or that “idiot Trier” as characters in Exodus disparagingly refer to him – whose presence is the most poignant.
Returning once again to the famous to-camera outros of each episode where the director would himself appear and provide his concluding thoughts, this time there is a twist: now 25 years older, while we hear von Trier’s voice, we do not see him. Telling us that “I can’t live up to the unbearable cockiness of the young Lars von Trier”, he confesses that vanity is the reason for his refusal to appear in person.
Added to this is the notably different sound of his voice, related perhaps to the fact that he publicly announced his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease only a month before The Kingdom Exodus had its world premiere at Venice in September 2022. In light of this, until very recently there was some question regarding whether we’d see any new from Von Trier again at all, but a video he posted to his Instagram in mid-August 2023 putting out a public call for a “girlfriend” and “muse” explicitly states that he believes he has a few more projects left in him yet. Regardless, that he was able to finally bring the story of Kingdom Hospital to such a satisfying end in itself feels like a significant accomplishment, and gives a much-needed and long-yearned for sense of closure for those of us who were so radically seduced by the original two series.
NOTE: Without actors and writers, we wouldn’t have movies. This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in the United States, and the author of this review supports them unequivocally.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: the Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.