El reino

Simply one of the best and most original European tv series ever. So original, clever and visually groundbreaking it was way ahead of its time. Dont miss this one!

I am becoming fascinated with Lars von Trier. After seeing 'Zentropa', 'Breaking the Waves' and 'The Idiots', each movie different from the last, and each a minor masterpiece. Now I've watched another piece in the puzzle of his career, the fantastic (in all meanings of the word!) mini-series 'The Kingdom', and I'm once again hugely impressed! I can't think of any contemporary American or British director with his range or inventiveness.

'The Kingdom' concerns a large and sophisticated Danish hospital which is being haunted by ghosts. The doctors who work there are an eccentric bunch at the best of times, and things get progressively weirder. 'The Kingdom' successfully juggles humour, mystery, horror, soap opera and surrealism in a way not seen since 'Twin Peaks'. I found it to be compulsive viewing and can't wait to get my hands on the sequel, which sadly is nowhere to be found in Australia.

'The Kingdom' I'm sure will one day be regarded as a television classic. It's THAT good. I loved it, and hopefully you will too. Hats off to von Trier!

Lars Von Trier perfects his dogme style with this fascinating Horror satire about a haunted, bizarre hospital. I watched both this and `The Kingdom II' back-to-back over one night and I must say the six hours just flew by. I've never had so much fun watching a television series before. Every thing was brilliant, the casting and sepia toned style helped give a reality of the situation and a labyrinthine theme to the hospital itself. All the actors were wonderful and totally believable. I hope they make more episodes soon; I'm hooked...

The closest that American television has even come close to "The Kingdom" was the recent Stephen King mini-series "Storm of the Century." Still, even this was nowhere near as engaging as this Danish mini-series. Practically none of this would ever get through through censors here.

Loopy hospital drama, restless spirits, an incubus, Voodoo... it's all here, it all makes perfect sense and it is a series that leaves one screaming for more when it ends (I will be scouring this city for "The Kingdom II" before the week is over). I won't ruin a bit of it, other than to say the closing scene shocked me so much that my original critical summery cannot be printed here. Truly amazing film-making, and definitely a glimpse of what television could be without all the censors and constant pandering to the lowest common denominator.

I didn't like Riget I much. It was boring, and horror stories like that had been told a thousand times before. On the positive side, Stig Helmer was one of the most memorable characters ever, and he was even better than he was in the second series. Kudos to Jaregard for an outstanding interpretation. Also on the positive side, some things were funny (Helmer with the car rims) and some were genuinely absurd (where Krogshoj lives). But overall, Riget remained well inside the boundaries of the horror genre, and the narration didn't reach the critical point where everything becomes art.

Now Riget II, a masterpiece. The second series expresses all the unrealized potential of the first one. The tone is consistently grotesque, each action and interaction is quite absurd, and all the bonds with reality have been cut. There's no suspension of disbelief anymore, because everything is obviously surreal. Still, the audience is hooked till the end following a plot that is part crazy, part logical and compelling. There's much more humor and much more horror than there was in the first series, allowing the film to reach that critical point where contrast between tones and genres creates a rich canvas of relationships and meanings. You will smile at the electric car, believe the zombie poison, and listen to extremely deep pieces of philosophy by the dishwashers and Lars von Trier himself. The last scene with Little Brother is painful and hilarious at the same time, while flirting with a cosmological, universal, spiritual significance: hats off. You will also witness delightful, unbelievable situations, that make perfectly sense within the plot: this is a subtle form of art that started to reach its full potential in the nineties.

I watched Riget II before year 2000 for the first time, and then recently watched it again. At the time, I was quite shocked by its originality. Many things that von Trier did here spread around later in film making: I think this series was really ahead of the times. For example, I could not but notice the similarities between Riget II and "Arrested Development", the comedy series: camera work, editing, jumps between scenes and subplots, dry humor, over the top characters, lots of things were exactly the same. It's like Von Trier developed a language to imagine and handle absurd situations with ease; you can notice the obvious progress he made from Riget I to II.