Series review: "Riket Exodus" directed by Lars von Trier

25 years have passed

since the single-minded Mrs. Marple epigone Mrs. Drusse disappeared in her fight against evil and an incompetent hospital management, and since Ernst-Hugo Järegård's hot-tempered chief physician Stig Helmer fell off the peg.

Denmark's most prestigious hospital is still plagued by evil spirits and an almost imbecile medical staff stuck in odd rituals and palpable confusion.

And the gate to the abyss beneath the Kingdom is, still(?) about to be opened.

Many characters reappear, aged or in some cases replaced with similar characters.

The focus is once again on an old lady, Karen, and it is at her home that the third season begins.

She watches "The Kingdom" but thinks the ending is incomplete, leaving too many loose ends.

She therefore goes to Rigshospitalet but is not taken seriously because she seems to believe that what happened in the series was real.

At the reception, a guard mutters that "That idiot von Trier and his satanic series have ruined the Kingdom's reputation".

Karen still slips in and the reality and fiction of the series merge. 

The similar meta-commentaries

reappear here and there, and when the credits of the episode roll, where we are used to seeing the director standing in front of a red curtain and advising us to "take the good with the bad", we now only see his shoes sticking out under said curtain.

"The years have left their mark," says (the Parkinson's patient) von Trier there behind the cloth, adding that he "cannot live up to the cockiness of the young von Trier".

A little cute, and sad.

But he undeniably still has the smile on the corner of his mouth.

Here it is spread over five episodes in a whirlwind of bizarre events, funny details, twisted pranks and crazy characters.

Macabre and seriously entertaining.

Lars von Trier in a playful mood.

But no, it's not much of a plot, more like reasonably controlled chaos.

As before, it is about science versus superstition, about human vanity and pettiness, about the arrogance of the authorities - all seasoned with a bit of biblical symbolism.

Little Brothers complex, which runs like an aorta through the entire body of the Kingdom (and also gave name to Udo Kier's grotesque giant baby).

We Swedes get to receive a bunch of love-friendly pacifiers.

There are jokes about consent, about the hen concept, our political correctness and much more.

Expected - but fun.

Speaking of "dance villains", Ernst-Hugo Järegård is obviously missing in the role of Dr. Helmer, but Mikael Persbrandt actually qualifies as a good runner-up.

He gives us a delightfully feverish and lost Helmer Jr. who joins the hospital secret order SA - Swedish Anonymous, to wage war against the slack country, "scum out of lime and water" as his blessed father so nicely put it.

Incidentally, there are many

more Swedes in the final season, such as Tuva Novotny and Ida Engvoll, but the funniest is Alexander Skarsgård's character, a Swedish lawyer who has his office in a small hospital toilet.

Lars von Trier is one of the absolute best filmmakers of our time, this isn't one of his best works, but it's damn clever.

In fact, I sit and smile and chuckle for the entire five or so hours.