The House That Jack Built’s Hellish Ending Explained

Here’s the literally hellish ending to The House That Jack Built explained. Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has a long history of making controversial and intentionally provocative films. Examples include Breaking The Waves, Nymphomaniac and Antichrist. His work tends to greatly polarise critics and audiences and they frequently explore taboo topics and feature scenes of shocking violence.

Case in point would be The House That Jack Built, a 2018 serial killer movie starring Matt Dillon as the title character. Jack is an architect and psychopath who has viciously murdered dozens of people, with the film flashing back to several of his worst crimes. Uma Thurman and Riley Keough play two of Jack’s victims, and there’s perhaps no better example of the critical divide surrounding Lars von Trier than the movie’s Cannes debut. Over a hundred members of the audience are said to have walked out of the screening in disgust, but it was still greeted with a standing ovation when it was finished.

The House That Jack Built isn’t just a straightforward serial killer movie though, as the film is told from Jack’s recollections as he’s being led into Hell itself. The story’s structure is based around Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy, a poem that came to define the image of Hell as the main character is led through all it’s nine levels. Just like Inferno, Jack is led into the abyss by Virgil (Bruno Ganz, The Counselor), to whom he recounts his many horrific acts.

The House That Jack Built is dripping in subtext and meaning, with the film itself being something of an essay on-screen violence and the role of art by Lars von Trier. That’s part of the reason for the film’s literal descent into Hell, which is kicked off towards the end when Jack is on the verge of being caught. After planning to kill five people with one bullet, Jack has to open a long-frozen freezer door in his basement to gain enough space for the shot. That’s where he meets Ganz’s Verge, who is mysteriously hanging out in the freezer and encourages Jack to build a “house” out of the many corpses he’s acquired over the years.

Jack then constructs a gruesome house out of the bodies and then follows Verge into a hole at the bottom of the house as police break into his basement and open fire. The House That Jack Built follows the two men on a Dante’s Inferno-style trip, with the last scene seeing Verge lead Jack to a broken bridge over the center of Hell itself. Verge led Jack deeper into Hell than the circle he was supposed to end up at. Jack spots a stairway across the bridge that Verge says leads to Heaven, so he decides to chance it and climb across the wall, but soon slips and disappears into the hole as “Hit The Road Jack” plays over the credits.

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Padraig Cotter
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It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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