Cinema walk-outs, accusations from actors of psychological and physical abuse, seemingly offering support to fascists both old (wartime Nazis) and new (Putin’s Russia). On and away from the screen, Lars von Trier has attracted scorn, derision and contempt, all rising at the same rate as his reputation soared and his work became more contentious. Back in the mid-90s, von Trier’s persona was a few beats shy of the poisonous enfant terrible he was to become; more of a small-screen scamp, he appears at the end of The Kingdom episodes attired in dinner suit and bowtie, offering largely impenetrable philosophical musings about his hospital-set horror-comedy.

The Kingdom’s first two seasons arrived in 1994 and 1997, revolving around the odd (fictional) goings-on in Copenhagen’s largest medical facility, Rigshospitalet, which appears to be haunted from top to bottom while its doctors and nurses engage in behaviour that veers from gently slapstick to infuriatingly daft. At its more extreme ends, the body horror is ramped up, especially when one medic gives birth to . . . well, it’s just too awful to describe in print.

Von Trier returned to complete his trilogy in 2022 with The Kingdom: Exodus and revelled in meta narratives. The opening scene features an elderly woman watching season two’s finale and proclaiming its creator an ‘idiot’ while the Rigshospitalet receptionist expresses disdain for the show having ruined that establishment’s fine reputation and making fools of its staff. 

Dubbed as ‘Denmark’s answer to Twin Peaks’, such a comparison will tease Lynch devotees into seeking those parallels. There’s a wide array of characters doing off-kilter things such as a pathology professor agreeing to a (cancerous) liver transplant; a student submitting himself to sleep therapy during which he comes under attack from zombie cannibals; and a Dane-hating Swedish surgeon heading to Haiti for an episode to check out the voodoo scene there. There are also ghost ambulances, severed heads and all manner of ancient apparitions.

Even von Trier’s on-screen chatter recalls the Log Lady appearing in those re-syndicated Twin Peaks episodes to utter similarly obtuse remarks. One spot where we have light and day is in the opening credits sequence: while Twin Peaks is cool and ominous, The Kingdom’s terrible intro is surely a deliberately bad pastiche of soapy medical dramas. Emboldened by a cast of Scandi stalwarts (including two Skarsgårds and a Mikkelsen) you’ll have seen in Borgen, The Bridge, The Killing et al, The Kingdom is a series that infuriates and exhilarates in similar doses.

The Kingdom Trilogy is available as a Blu-Ray boxset, and on MUBI, now.