The Kingdom: Exodus Review: Lars von Trier’s Hospital Drama Is at War with Itself

The general pointlessness of its supernatural events leaves Exodus feeling like a retread.

The Kingdom: Exodus
Photo: MUBI

The long-awaited third season of Lars von Trier’s comedy of paranormal errors The Kingdom again takes place in the newly renovated Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen’s largest hospital, and bears witness to all sorts of unresolved and irresolvable hostilities, both of the supernatural and bureaucratic kind. And like the first the two seasons, which originally aired on Danish television in 1994 and 1997, it finds plenty of room for merciless satire and soap operatics. But the register of this new season, called Exodus, plays as if von Trier is attempting to channel the spirit of his work prior to his Dogme 95 experiments and shocks to the system, like he’s trying to avoid any accusations of bad taste and emotional terrorism.

It’s affirming to see von Trier still so committed to suffocating humor, but Exodus’s sendups and winks—it opens with Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), taking over protagonist duties from Kirsten Rolffes’s Sigrid Drusse, watching the finale of the ’97 season and bemoaning the lack of closure—are head-scratching at best. No amount of meta-commentary about modern TV’s wheel-spinning qualities can obscure the fact that Exodus is symptomatic of the same things. Von Trier’s penchant for extra-textual irony can be exciting, and inextricable from his isolation from the larger independent film industry, but here it’s hard to locate that humor’s thematic center.

One will be quick to notice that the cleaner digital sheen of Exodus makes the 25 years since the last season bluntly felt. But the sepia color scheme is the same, as is the meathead metal of the theme song and the storybook intro detailing the bleaching ponds upon which the Rigshospitalet, colloquially called Riget (literally “the kingdom”), was erected.

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Karen’s arrival at the hospital, in search of Little Brother (Udo Kier), is an occasion for our reintroduction to the hospital and all that’s changed since 1997, and all that hasn’t. Little Brother’s mother, neurosurgeon Judith (Birgitte Raaberg), is still on staff, and while Helmer Jr. (Mikael Persbrandt) has replaced his Swedish doctor father (Ernst-Hugo Järegård, who starred as Stig Helmer in the first two seasons, died in 1998), he keeps the torch of the older Helmer alive with his own anti-Danish feelings. As before, a pair of dishwashers serve as a Greek chorus, only now one has been replaced by a robot, in a nod to changing times.

Von Trier’s editing strategies, such as the disorientingly way he skips to later moments within the same sequence, are in full force, as if he were thumbing his nose at the rhythmically straightforward televisual docucomedies that came and went in the wake of the prior two seasons of The Kingdom. But the series buckles under the weight of its self-aware nuttiness and the incongruity that defines the ostensible battle between science and the supernatural.

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Von Trier and co-writer Niels Vørsel bring an even more contemporary lens this time around to their depiction of the goings-on at the hospital, what with the medical system here kneecapped by egoism, racism, and all-around non-communication. But the lack of an overall point to all the close encounters of the cosmic kind leaves Exodus feeling like a retread.

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Even the show’s interpolations are mostly limp, from the name-dropping of Carl Theodor Dreyer during a crazed drinking game to a reenactment of The Seventh Seal’s finale. Von Trier and Vørsel essentially admitted to writing themselves into a corner with the finale of the second season, and Exodus feels as if it’s playing out in that very same corner.

Fans of The Kingdom will undoubtedly be thrilled by five-plus hours of circuitous, Twin Peaks-indebted plotting, but the way in which the season descends in half-hearted fashion from the improbable into the absurd will test the agnostic’s tolerance. Even something as digressive as the way that the Swedish lawyer (Alexander Skarsgård) representing both the victim and the accused in a sexual harassment case works out of a women’s bathroom comes to feel like a tall ask, despite his connection to a character form the previous season.

Following The House That Jack Built, which thrived on jarring swings from mordant humor to soul-laid-bare confessionalism, Exodus’s self-conscious topicality and zaniness mostly scans as pro forma, from the depiction of the inappropriate treatment of the hospital’s newly diversified staff from white superiors to the climactic exodus, wherein the full force of the spirit realm is truly unleashed—though that’s also something that could be said about the first two seasons of The Kingdom. Housing all of these ideas within ostensible parody tends to defang them, not least of which because the soap-operatic tropes are so easy and the endless meetings and tête-à-têtes largely coast by on either shallow or recycled humor, sometimes both.

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The proceedings are enlivened by a shapeshifting Willem Dafoe as an emissary from hell disguised as a hospital employee, and the reemergence of Little Brother, now a giant, weeping head crowning out of those bleaching ponds. But those gleeful peaks are few and far between. If von Trier and Vørsel’s aim here is to impart the fatigue that’s an inherent characteristic of the hospital drama, as well as the redundancies that the technical and social features of hospitals exhibit, then the series is some kind of success. But given the forceful way that The House That Jack Built redirected all its humor and frustration back toward its maker, it’s disappointing to see how Exodus lines up the first two season’s soft targets for von Trier all over again and, in the process, enables not his worst and often most existing tendencies but rather his most boring.

Score: 
 Cast: Bodil Jørgensen, Mikael Persbrandt, Lars Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro, Tuva Novotny, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Ghita Nørby, Søren Pilmark, Birthe Neumann, Ida Engvoll, Birgitte Raaberg, Peter Mygind, Jesper Sørensen, Henning Jensen, Solbjørg Højfeldt, Laura Christensen, Udo Kier  Network: MUBI

Patrick Preziosi

Patrick Preziosi is a Brooklyn-born and -based critic. He’s written about film and literature for photogénie, Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook, and his Substack triple feature.

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