Is Lars von Trier’s ‘The Kingdom’ the greatest European TV show ever?

Posted On July 24, 2024July 24, 2024

Danish movie director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly best known for his controversial and provocative films that explore the darkest recess of human behaviour and the psyche. With the likes of Breaking the Waves, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac and The House That Jack Built to his name, it’s easy to see why von Trier has assumed a cultural position as Denmark’s (not so) enfant terrible.

While von Trier has indeed cemented himself as a master of the big screen with several notable feature-length works, it’s also true that he has tried his artistic hand in other mediums, including television. Between November and December 1994, the Danish TV channel DR aired the first season of von Trier and Tomas Gislason’s supernatural horror series, Riget, titled in English The Kingdom.

Three years later, Riget II arrived, and a third and final season titled Exodus was released in 2022. Unsurprisingly, considering the personnel at the helm, The Kingdom features an intoxicating blend of horror, dark comedy and elements of the surreal, with von Trier once admitted to being influenced by one of greatest TV shows of all time in the shape of David Lynch and Mark Frosts’ legendary series Twin Peaks, which certainly shares an air of darkness with the Danish director’s small screen effort.

The show takes place in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, with each episode focusing on different members of the hospital’s admittedly strange staff and patients, some of which come into contact with supernatural occurrences. There’s natural a tapping into the classic medical dramas like E.R. or Casualty on offer in The Kingdom, but with von Trier on hand, there is always an examination of the weird or the eerie, which juxtaposes the banality of what we might expect to find in an everyday hospital ward.

“The Kingdom is a ghost story set at the Kingdom Hospital spiced up a bit with a few soaplike elements,” von Trier himself had once noted. “There are doctors and nurses who love each other, and a few minor disturbances on their way in some plaster falling off the wall. The hospital is becoming unravelled in some way or another”.

Character-wise, The Kingdom is crawling with flawed and absurd individuals who help to play into the strange combination of humour and darkness throughout the show. For instance, there is a haughty, xenophobic Swedish neurosurgeon by the name of Stig Helmer, who espoused his hatred for the Danish at every opportunity, often to a hilarious degree, while the patient Mrs Drusse is someone who communicates with the hospital’s many ghosts, ensuring that something spooky is afoot at every moment.

The hospital itself, with its labyrinthine corridors and dimly lit waiting rooms, is like a character in its own right, creating an overwhelming sense of dread throughout the ward. Von Trier captures Righospitalet in a dirty, sepia tone through handheld camerawork, like he often had in his many Dogme 95 films of the 1990s, amplifying the odd feel amid an almost documentary-like authenticity.

The Kingdom isn’t mere aesthetic silliness, though, as von Trier tackles some serious themes, including medical corruption, existentialism and the boundaries of the real and the metaphysical. “My personal attitude to the medical profession, or the world of medicine in general, is full of angst,” he had once said of the overall tone of his television show. “It’s hard to explain what this angst derives from… The insecurity and the feeling of your life being in other people’s hands is very unpleasant for me”.

Indeed, there’s an unpleasant quality that rings true throughout the entirety of The Kingdom, but, after all, when has a hospital ever been a nice place to be? As intellectual as ever for von Trier, with an influence from Twin Peaks evident, plus a brilliant blending of genre, The Kingdom may well be the greatest European TV show of all time; if not, then it’s well up there. If you’re in for an unsettlingly surreal yet hilarious watch, then look no further and swing by the Rigshospitalet for a quick check-up.

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