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THE KINGDOM
(Riget)
Rating: 
Denmark/Sweden. 1994.
Directors – Morten Arnfred & Lars von Trier, Screenplay – Lars von Trier & Tomas Gislason, Based on a Screenplay by Lars von Trier & Niels Vørsel, Producers – Sven Abrahamsen, Philippe Bober, Peter Aalbaek Jensen & Ole Reim, Photography – Eric Kress, Music – Joachim Holbek, Makeup Effects – Kim & Lis Olsson, Art Direction – Jette Lehmann. Production Company – Zentropa Entertainments/Danmarks Radio/Swedish Television/WDR/Arte and the Co-production Office.
Cast:
Ernst Hugo Järegård (Stig Helmer), Kirsten Rolffes (Sigurd Drusse), Søren Pilmark (Jurgen Hook), Peter Mygind (Mogge Moesgaard), Holger Juul Hansen (Professor Einar Moesgaard), Jens Okking (Bulder Drusse), Baard Owe (Professor Bondo), Birgitte Raabjerg (Judith), Ghita Nørby (Rigmor), Vita Jensen & Morten Rotne Lettes (Dishwashers), Solbjørg Højfeldt (Camilla), Louise Fribo (Sanne), Annevig Schelde Cíbber (Mary Jensen), Udo Kier (Professor Aage Krueger)
Plot: The Kingdom hospital in Copenhagen is haunted by a mysterious ambulance that keeps pulling up outside the entrance and then vanishing. The arrogant and unpleasant Swedish doctor Stig Helmer has recently taken up a position as consultant neurosurgeon. Helmer dismisses one patient Sigurd Drusse as a malingerer but she is a medium and contrives to make her way back into the hospital, drawn by the ghostly voice of a child crying in the elevator shaft. Helmer tries to cover up a botched operation but his bullied junior surgeon Jurgen Hook gets copies of the reports and uses them to blackmail Helmer. Helmer responds with a plan to use a Haitian zombie serum on Hook. Meanwhile pathology head Professor Bondo wants a diseased hematoma for his research and when the family are unwilling to sign the body over to him, he decides the only way is to have the hematoma transplanted into himself. Mrs. Drusse finds the ghost is that of young Mary Jensen who was killed in the hospital. As she attempts an exorcism, she discovers that Mary is about to reborn as the child the neurologist Judith has suddenly become pregnant with.
The Kingdom was a hit Danish tv mini-series. It was shown to international film festival audiences in two parts of two-and-a-half-hour length. The Kingdom was the brainchild of Lars von Trier, the director who had made films such as The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987) and then made a big international splash with Zentropa (1991), before subsequently going into the critical accolades of Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005) and The Boss Of It All (2006). Lars von Trier is, in this author’s opinion, the most interesting and adventurous director in the world at the moment.
von Trier admits the source of inspiration for The Kingdom was David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91) whose shadow of bizarre happenings hangs over the whole enterprise. The series takes its time to build but once it does it becomes compulsive watching. There’s an especially rich vein of black comedy running throughout – like the operating room sequence where Ernst Hugo Järegård finds he has to operate on a patient who has been hypnotized rather than anesthetized and keeps waking up throughout; or the scenes involving the various attempts to break into the archives that all go catastrophically wrong; and the end of the film with everything bizarre in the hospital contriving to make itself known at once. Ernst Hugo Järegård gives a wonderful performance as the bullying Helmer – his rants against the stupidity of the Danes on the roof of the hospital and the scene where he dresses Søren Pilmark down for ordering a CAT scan are side-splitting.
Balanced against this are a series of genuinely eerie manifestations of the supernatural. There is a genuinely spooky scene with Kirsten Rolffes communicating with a dying woman, which is conducted by the dying woman causing the room’s neon fluorescent lights to flicker. So too are the scenes where they manage to pick up the little girl crying “Why did they kill me?” in the background noise of the room, or the moment where Kirsten Rolffes walks through the hospital with the little girl’s doll and her ghostly hand comes up through the floor to grab it. Also very effective is the opening credits sequence that clearly sets itself in the divide between science and superstition, which contains a genuinely striking metaphor about the cracks in the walls of reason having started to appear. The truly spooky manifestations aside though, one does feel that the appearance of solely a ghostly little girl does sell a grandiose concept as the breakdown in the walls of reason somewhat short.
The series is shot in sepia-tone which, when seen in cinematic blow-up, tends to be rather blurry on the eyes, something further added to by much use of handheld camerawork. The biggest bummer about the film version is that after some five hours it ends with a frustrating ‘to be continued ...’ This occurred with the lesser but nevertheless still enjoyable The Kingdom III, but the subsequent deaths of both Ernst Hugo Järegård and Kirsten Roelffs has put the likelihood of this in question. The series was eventually given remake for US tv as Kingdom Hospital (2004) scripted by Stephen King, which lasted for 13 episodes. Although quite faithful to the original, the element of black comedy seemed distinctly missing and the series a disappointment.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1995
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