KINGDOM 2, THE
SYNOPSIS:
These new episodes of 'The Kingdom' pick up where the original series left off. At the
Kingdom hospital in Copenhagen, the ghost of little Mary, murdered many years ago by her
demonic father Kruger (Udo Kier) has finally been laid to rest, thanks to the elderly
psychic medium and eternal patient Mrs Drusse (Kristian Rolffes). But at the same time,
the intern Judith (Birgitte Raaberg) has just given birth to another of Kruger's children
(Udo Kier) a semi-human creature that grows at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, eccentric
neurosurgeon Stig Helmer (Ernst Hugo Jaregard) has returned from Haiti with a voodoo
potion he intends to use on Judith's fiance Krogen (Soren Pilmark), a maverick doctor and
sometime drug dealer who means to expose Helmer's role in the botched operation that left
a young girl brain-damaged for life. Helmer also has to deal with the demands of his
equally nutty lover Rigmor (Ghita Norby), an anaesthetist who seems to have developed an
obsession with badgers. Among the medical students, the dorky Mogge (Peter Mygind) takes
advice from his shifty friend Christian (Ole Boison) on how to win the love of the
splatter-movie-addicted Sanne (Louise Fribo), while other students risk their lives by
driving ambulances blindfold through the night. Hit by one of these ambulances, Mrs Drusse
returns to the hospital, where she hovers between life and death. The saintly Professor
Bondo (Baard Owe) is also close to death, having had a cancerous liver implanted in his
own body for research purposes. Overcome by these and other crises, hospital administrator
Dr Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen), Christian's father, suffers a mental breakdown. And
this is only the beginning...
"These new episodes of Lars von Trier's addictive horror-comedy-soap-opera make
ideal holiday viewing. After the first hour or two you get accustomed to the rhythms of
von Trier's elaborately plotted jokes (which often take hours to pay off) and to the cheap
and nasty look. The complex video-to-film transfer creates an overall visual fuzziness,
with a restricted color palette suggesting cardboard soaked in urine; handheld camerawork
and jump-cuts add to the sense of a functional, low-budget, on-the-run style, a filmic
equivalent to the yellowed pages and blunt prose of pulp magazines. It's this combination
of documentary roughness with indifference to real-world logic (the gore effects are
blatantly fake) that transforms a busy city hospital into a 'kingdom' as strange and
self-contained as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. And the crumbling corridors shelter a
similar gallery of ingrown grotesques: above all, there's Ernst Hugo Jaregard's Stig
Helmer, the Swedish head surgeon with the huge mournful face like a baby hippo, as
fabulously self-pitying, mean and pompous as ever. von Trier is one of those directors
(like the Coen brothers) who look strained and phony whenever they try for a big
'meaningful' statement, who are happiest when embarked on this sort of mad private
project, run according to arbitrary, self-devised rules. Yet as the mutant baby spawned at
the end of the last series grows up into an agonised Udo Kier, von Trier also has
limitless opportunities to indulge his 'serious' love of crass sentiment and weirdly
sincere mysticism. Voodoo curses, trips to the afterlife, gnomic disabled dishwashers in
the basement - will all of this finally turn out to mean something? It's too soon
to know (the ending is another cliffhanger) but as The Kingdom lurches towards some
almighty final showdown on Christmas Day, it seems quite possible that von Trier is
working up to a full-scale apocalypse – or maybe the birth of a new Messiah. You have
been warned."
Jake Wilson
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SOFCOM MOVIE TIMES
KINGDOM 2, THE
(Norway / Denmark / Italy / Sweden)
CAST: Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Kirsten Rolffes, Peter Mygind, Holger Juul Hansen, Søren
Pilmark
DIRECTOR: Morton Arnfred, Lars von Trier
SCRIPT: Morton Arnfred, Lars von Trier
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Eric Kress
EDITOR: Pernille Bech Christensen, Molly Marlene Stensgård
MUSIC: Joachim Holbek
PRODUCTION DESIGN: Jette Lehmann
RUNNING TIME: 286 minutes
AUSTRALIAN DISTRIBUTOR: Palace
AUSTRALIAN RELEASE: Dec 26, 1998 Melbourne (other states to follow)
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