Like ER and Casualty, but much better (The Kingdom [1994] (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Kingdom [1994] (DVD)
Date:	04.12.05 (156 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent funny and weird drama

Disadvantages: Series 2 unavailable, series 3 never even made

Dane Lars von Trier has made quite a name for himself as an art house director, somehow managing to land A-list stars for films that lack anything even remotely resembling mainstream appeal. He is, by all accounts, a crazy, crazy man, who either shows a stunning contempt for his audience, or has a very strange sense of humour. Possibly both. His controversial film The Idiots put him on the map (I think it’s great, but it is potentially incredibly offensive), and since then films like Dancer in the Dark and Dogville have consolidated his position.

Before all that, though, he made this mini series. I don’t really have the patience for von Trier’s more recent films, but The Kingdom is wonderful. Five hour-long episodes of quirky hospital drama, by turns hilarious and spooky.

So, there’s a hospital in Denmark called the Kingdom. The neurology department is run by the amiable but rather naïve Dr Moesgaard. A distinguished Swedish surgeon, the obnoxious uber-rationalist Stig Helmer, has recently joined the department – he is hated by most of his colleagues, and is under investigation for an operation on a young girl that went tragically wrong. Meanwhile, medical student Mogge is besotted with an older doctor who runs some kind of sleep-related experiment. Trying to impress her, he pulls an ill-advised prank involving a severed human head. This leads to his being blackmailed by the idealistic but unscrupulous Krogshoj, who in turn is in love with Judith, who might have been made pregnant by a ghost.

Meanwhile, spiritualist Mrs Drusse, whose hefty son Buldur works at the Kindgom as an orderly, has an encounter with a ghostly child in a lift. Concluding that all is not right in the hospital on a metaphysical level, she sets out to investigate, in spite of Helmer’s attempts to have her banned as a malingerer. Got all that? Good. There are other sub-plots, too, involving Dr Bondo’s obsession with a certain type of liver cancer, and a secret society of surgeons, but reciting any more plot is really not going to help anyone.

This series is so good in so many ways. It’s shot in a low-key, realistic way, with muted colours, and the direction is brilliant, skilful without ever being obtrusive. The acting, which is without exception superb, is naturalistic and convincing, even as things get weirder and weirder (few of the actors are familiar to me from anything else, mostly being Scandinavian). Ernst-Hugo Järegård as Helmer is probably the best – he’s become one of my favourite characters in anything ever, remorselessly unpleasant, unbelievably arrogant, and absolutely hilarious. His monologues as he stands on the hospital roof at night and rails against the Denmark in general are some of my favourite things in any series.

The whole thing is very, very funny. There’s a wonderful sequence of escalating calamities that before the hapless Moesgaard in the final episode that had me howling with laughter. (Yes, literally howling. Like a wolf.) The fact that the comedy is interspersed with some occasionally quite spooky supernatural stuff makes it all the better. When it was first shown in 1994, the series was compared to Twin Peaks, which is probably the thing it most resembles, if it can be said to resemble anything. It’s a lot more pared-down than Twin Peaks, with fewer irritating sub-plots and less emphasis on sex, but on the other hand I think Twin Peaks was more successful in combining horror and comedy.

It’s hard to tell how seriously we’re supposed to take the spooky stuff – on the one hand, it is quite atmospheric, but on the other it goes completely over the top, especially towards the end. What little incidental music there is seems to be trying to build an atmosphere of mounting threat, but whenever anything sinister starts to happen, the mood is invariably broken by something funny. The last-minute appearance by European exploitation icon Udo Kier is extremely impressive, but too ludicrous to provoke any response other than slack-jawed, slightly nervous laughter.

This is definitely well-worth seeing. It’s not a completely satisfying experience, sadly, as it was never completed. There were supposed to be three series. Only two were made, and only the first is available in this country. Series two has been released on DVD in Denmark, but Ernst-Hugo Järegård (Helmer) died in 1998, which is presumably what prevented the final series from being made. The series on this DVD is still entertaining enough to watch on its own terms, but if you get into it you’ll definitely want to know what happens next (especially given that it ends with a stonking cliff-hanger). Series 2 is faster-paced and not quite as good (although still fabulous), and in this world of ebay and bittorrents, not that hard to get hold of. But you’ll still be left hanging at the end of it all.

The DVD itself has one small flaw – if you watch the episodes individually, you’ll get the first second of the next episode at the end of the one you’re watching. Not a serious problem in any way, but mildly annoying, and hardly a difficult thing to have checked for. The only extra is a decent 50-minute documentary about von Trier, made in 1997. It features interviews with the director and various of his collaborators, along with clips of the films he’d made up until that point. There isn’t much about The Kingdom, but it’s good stuff, and Trier is a funny guy (funny-peculiar rather than funny-ha-ha). Everything on the DVD is Danish language, and subtitled (there are many annoying typos).

The DVD is rated 18 – I think this is purely down to the last few minutes of the last episode – there’s nothing otherwise that would warrant more than a 15. (Although throughout the series there are two characters played by people with downs syndrome – they comment on the action and try to guess what’s happening. They are, I think, meant to represent us, the audience. Now I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would object to using disabled actors – they clearly aren’t being exploited – but given that the BBFC gave ‘Freaks’ a 15 because it features disabled actors, it’s possible that this has contributed to the rather harsh 18 here. Gotta love the British censor.)

This series is fantastic. All hospital-based dramas should follow its lead. There was an American remake written by Stephen King (Kingdom Hopspital), but I haven’t seen that – the last Stephen King mini-series I saw (Rose Red) was awful, and I imagine I’d probably just get annoyed at the differences between it and the original. But Lars von Trier’s Kingdom is highly recommended. It’s just a shame it was never finished.

The DVD doesn’t seem to be widely available anymore – amazon quotes outrageous prices for it – but it shouldn’t be hard to find second hand.

Summary: Nice DVD release of an undeservedly obscure TV show