‘The Kingdom Exodus’ Review: Lars von Trier Is Back to His Old Tricks, Unleashing Hell on a Danish Hospital
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “The Kingdom Exodus” begins with a joke, and for the next five hours, it never gets serious, not even for a second. That’s not what you might expect for the long-delayed finale to Lars von Trier’s made-for-TV horror series, though it sure makes this over-the-top return to the haunted Rigshospitalet — that big, brutalist medical center in the heart of Copenhagen — a lot more fun. For all of two minutes, von Trier tricks us into thinking that maybe this third season is going to look like a polished, peak-TV miniseries of the sort you might find on HBO or Netflix (after all, the original series came out in 1994, one year before the artifice-renouncing Danish revolution that was Dogme 95, and von Trier has since gone back to making dark fantasies with heightened style). We open on a closeup of a woman’s eye, ideally lit and steadily framed, reflecting a TV screen on which a tuxedoed von Trier appears, a quarter-century younger, over the credits of Season 2’s final episode.