Amazon.com video review:
The Kingdom defies categorization. This cult Danish
miniseries plays like a nightmarish cross between Twin Peaks
and Chicago Hope as directed by David Cronenberg, and even that
hardly captures the giddy absurdity of Lars von Trier's
soap-opera-cum-horror-tale. The setting is a modern hospital built on
a medieval graveyard, but the most terrifying ghosts belong not to
ancient history but rather to the hospital's own dark past. An
egotistical, self-righteous visiting Swedish doctor, who abhors the
Danes and screams his outrage in nightly rants from the hospital roof,
presides over this ensemble of eccentrics; but he's hardly the
strangest this hospital has to offer. ER has nothing on this
delirious madhouse, where haunted ambulances, a Masonic cult, a devil
cabal, demons, ghosts, and a most mysterious pregnancy lurk in the
fringes of more earthly (though equally bizarre) melodramas. Shooting
in video with a bobbing handheld camera, von Trier creates an
otherworldly atmosphere with the dimly lit corridors and bland,
drained color schemes, set to an eerily sparse soundtrack of echoing
hospital sounds and electronic wailings. The mix of deadpan hysteria
and spooky ghost story concludes with the most outrageous cliffhanger
put on film (to be continued in The Kingdom II). (The home
video also includes closing comments by a smiling von Trier himself,
unseen in the theatrical version.) Simply put, you've never seen
anything quite like this. --Sean Axmaker
