Lars von Trier attacks #MeToo with film

Controversial director Lars von Trier kicked up a storm of anger at the Cannes film festival on Tuesday with a brutal serial killer film that many saw as giving the finger to the #MeToo movement.

The Danish provocateur, who was banned from Cannes for seven years for saying he understood Hitler, has a frustrated architect played by Matt Dillon (pictured) kill a string of women and children in scenes of such “abhorrent cruelty” that many critics walked out. “Vile movie. Should not have been made. Actors [also] culpable,” said American entertainment reporter Roger Friedman, while another who left tweeted, “Gross. Pretentious. Vomitive. Torturous. Pathetic.”

Others lambasted The House That Jack Built for its “gruesome misogyny”. As the killer Jack horribly mutilates one girlfriend, he says: “Why is it always the man’s fault... If you are born male you are born to be guilty. Think of the injustice of that.”

He later makes a wallet from her severed breast. Dillon later told reporters that he had misgivings. “I didn’t want to do the movie for that” but was talked round by von Trier who he insisted was not a cruel man. But the sequence that sparked most revulsion — and also shook Dillon — was when Jack hunts down two children and their mother he invites on a picnic.

Von Trier was unrepentant saying that “if you kill a child it should be disturbing... It is dishonest not to [show] things that happen in real life, which is worse.”