Bryant Frazer’s review published on Letterboxd:
Mounting an atrocity exhibition that references the rural torture-killing of James Byrd Jr., the urban slaying of Kitty Genovese, and various U.S. military adventures around the world, Lars von Trier's new serial killer movie is, like Dogville and Manderlay before it, a two-and-a-half-hour rant about what motherfuckers Americans are. The central psycho here is Jack (Matt Dillon), a frustrated architect (he spends the film trying and failing to build a nice little house by a lake) who finds a creative outlet in heinous violence. Trier doesn't credit a misogyny consultant this time around, but he has a go at the MRA crowd anyway, having his anti-hero voice some impotent anti-woman invective before taking out his frustrations, Patrick Bateman-style, on a girlfriend (Riley Keough) he calls "Simple." The long moment Trier spends observing Jack as he literally draws dotted "cut here" lines around her breasts is Trier at his nastiest and most clever — you have the option of averting your gaze before the knife breaks the skin but, even if you don't, he's forced you to imagine the scene anyway. An even darker joke comes at the film's single most dismaying moment, when Jack insists that his family (wife, two kids, all doomed) don a perfect little set of red MAGA hats. In the film's best scene, Jack, overcome by OCD, finds himself unable to leave the site of a random murder, returning to the victim's living room again and again after imaging he overlooked a telltale smear of blood under a chair, table, or carpet corner. Relatable! At one point, LVT compares Jack to some of history's most notorious villains -- Hitler, Mussolini -- then brings his own films into the discussion. (Seriously; if you've never seen a woman give birth to Udo Kier on the big screen before, you're in luck because that timeless moment is coming soon to a theater near you.) This suggests to me mainly that LVT has an outsized sense of his own notoriety, as crimes against humanity go. Trier eventually gives Jack the boot, but not before going some distance to humanize him. I almost feel sorry for the nefarious little imp, who is obviously wrestling with his own legacy, but I prefer something like American Psycho's pure, incandescent rage against Wall Street's vapid, sociopathic one-percenters to this sympathy-for-the-devil business. As "Virg" (Bruno Ganz), Jack's eventual companion on his trip to the underworld, warns him, "Don't believe you're going to tell me something I haven't heard before."