TV Review – The Kingdom Season One

The Kingdom (Mubi)
Written by Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel, and Tómas Gislason
Directed by Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred

Twin Peaks is my favorite television show, and it was a worldwide phenomenon that we rarely see these days. As choices in media have expanded exponentially with streaming, in 1990, broadcast television was still the dominant home entertainment option. Twin Peaks was unlike anything American TV networks had ever shown, and this uniqueness allowed it to flourish outside the States in places like Japan, Denmark, and more. Filmmaker Lars von Trier was so inspired he developed his own TV series about a Copenhagen hospital filled with similarly eccentric characters with a supernatural bundle of secrets roiling beneath the building’s foundations.

Each episode of the series opens by briefly detailing the history of this land, the home of bleaching ponds centuries prior. Now, it is the home to a sprawling hospital complex where strange things occur regularly. Sigrid Drusse is an aging spiritualist whose son, Bulder, works as an orderly. She swears she heard a little girl crying on her solitary elevator ride as she sought another admission. Apparently, Sigrid had been doing this for years to get close to the ghosts that haunt Kingdom. 

Like Twin Peaks, several other stories are going on, each with quirky characters and humorous elements. Dr. Stig Helmer is a recent transplant from Sweden; rumors abound he came to Denmark because of plagiarizing the work of others in medical journal writings. Helmer cannot stand Sweden or how the hospital is run, wanting to be the final authority on neurosurgical matters. However, he botched an operation on a young patient and is desperately trying to cover that up. Dr. Bondo, head of pathology, desperately wants the liver of a man dying from cancer. This infected organ is a career opportunity to make real progress, and he’s willing to go to extreme ends to get it. 

Dr. Krogshøj, aka Hook, is an up-and-comer in neurosurgery and runs a black market on hospital supplies out of the basement. He’s started a romance with Dr. Petersen. She reveals she is pregnant by a former lover who ran off, but Hook suspects there’s more to this absent partner than they realize. All the while, two dishwashers with Down’s Syndrome talk to each other like a Greek chorus, more aware of what is going on in these people’s lives and the dark truth about the hospital than everyone else.

The look of The Kingdom is in keeping with von Trier’s style at the time, with lots of handheld, dimly lit verite scenes. It is an interesting juxtaposition with a kind of fantastical, farcical melodrama American audiences expect to look like a soap opera or medical drama. There’s lots of lust among the staff, tension between the doctors over control, and even larger conflict with the government over how the hospital is run. Like Twin Peaks, von Trier is in no rush to reveal his hand and lets the mystery stretch out over the four episodes comprising the first season. That final entry ends on quite the unhinged note, hinting at a dramatic pivot into the truly bizarre.

The first time I tried to watch The Kingdom back in college, I just couldn’t do it because of how grainy and ugly the video looked. Two decades later, living in Europe, I found aesthetic works. There’s a grimy, bleak overtone during the colder months, and The Kingdom does an excellent job of recreating that feel. Apparently, the director shot it on 16mm, but whatever he did in the post makes this resemble early digital video footage.

Knowing how intentionally obnoxious von Trier likes to be, I would not be surprised that he wanted the series to look this ugly. I also want to note that he appears at the end of every episode, dressed in a tuxedo as the credits roll, delivering a brief monologue on what we should take from the episodes, signing off with the shape of the cross and devil horns to remind us this is about good and evil.

The premise is ludicrous: demons are being unleashed on a hospital. Yet, von Trier and his writers don’t let the show go over the cliff into stupidity. Some characters react realistically; others don’t react to anything normally, so they respond accordingly to the living dead emerging from the bog.

My favorite character so far is Dr. Helmer. He’s an utter bastard, petty to the degree that he coerces a Haitian orderly into going to the man’s native island with him so he can possibly find a witch doctor to help him exact a voodoo curse on Hook. This is not played in a way that exoticizes Haiti but in a manner that highlights just how small & spiteful Helmer can be. He also removes his car’s hubcaps every morning while glaring at a group of Danish youth on the nearby sidewalk. 

If von Trier’s work has always grated on you, then I don’t suppose The Kingdom will win you over. His lifelong OCD and anxiety disorders are very present in his work; they feel like something made by a person always on edge. Yet, he can derive lots of humor from these situations. I know that the story will get stranger from here, and I’m also intrigued about what lies ahead in The Kingdom: Exodus, a Twin Peaks: The Return-like sequel made in 2022.