The Kingdom (Riget)

Even in this most bountiful of television eras, The Kingdom Exodus stands alone—or, rather, shoulder-to-shoulder with Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return—as a peerlessly haunting, hilarious and nutty expression of its creator’s artistic impulses. Rejoice that the chill and the damp have returned.

Von Trier occupies the same position as The Wizard of Oz, and the reverent secondhand Lynchisms would suggest that he knows it. But this lineage of homage comes through most strongly in the overall atmosphere of dreams, a pervasive non-reality that is at turns wondrous and terrifying, banal and miraculous. The elasticity of what’s possible under these oneiric conditions turns the hospital into an organism unto itself.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Von Trier is apologizing or accusing as much as putting another part of his life into his art. ... In a sense, it feels like a thought that has defined much of his remarkable career and he’s unpacking how that belief impacted his life and work through this ambitious five-hour film.

One doesn’t need to be a fan of von Trier, a long-standing agent provocateur, or of his equally provocative cinema, to appreciate the show’s sharp assessment of incompetence carried out under the cover of occupational prestige.

Most of the time, “Exodus” is so anarchic that von Trier and company seem to be making it up as they go along. Maybe they are, to some extent, but the irreverent and often farcical comedy benefits from a quarter-century of self-imposed creative discipline by the director.

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.

In the first three episodes, at least – we got more of a thin nostalgic wallow, with old running jokes revived and not much in the way of the soul-shredding showmanship and blistering image-making the Antichrist and Melancholia director has since mastered.