Having now left Cannes for a family reunion in Portugal, eaten a few proper meals in a row, and had a good night’s rest, I think I finally have the distance from the festival to fairly assess this year’s lineup (or at least what I saw of it). Seeing bad films is a part of any festival experience, though it was thankfully a small part of the bargain during Cannes 2018, where two of the 24 movies I saw were outright bombs (a no-name first feature from Critics’ Week and David Robert Mitchell’s disastrous It Follows follow-up, Under the Silver Lake). A double bill I’ll never forget: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, gun-to-head my favourite of the festival; and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, discussed in my previous dispatch, and a film that you will surely hear more about as soon as it plays outside of the festival bubble.

The Screen Daily poll, which is based on the responses from a jury of international critics, would tell you that Burning, Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years, is the best thing to premiere in Competition so far; Burning received a whopping 3.8 on the scale, the highest rating in the grid’s history, barely edging out the 3.7 Toni Erdmann was awarded in 2016. Redolent of the deliberate thrillers of Claude Chabrol and based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Lee’s exercise in sustained suspense weaves a terse ménage a trois: Jongsoo (Yoo Ah-in), an unemployed son of a farmer working on his first novel; Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), the elusive woman he knew from grade school; and Ben (Steven Yeun), a wealthy playboy who befriends Haemi when they’re stranded together at an airport in Kenya.

The class angle is undeniable, as is the tension that arises from it. Although Haemi shows interest in Ben (for his money) and Jongsoo is jealous of this affection, this is basically the only thing we understand about this triangle. Why Ben continues to maintain a relationship with Haemi, whose unrefined social skills he finds revolting, is an unresolved mystery that thrums throughout. When Haemi disappears without a trace, who else can we suspect as the perpetrator but Ben, the proud owner of an ultra-modernist apartment who openly brags about setting abandoned greenhouses ablaze?

“What kind of story are you writing?” someone asks Jongsoo. Unable to decide whether he’s the protagonist of a noir or a slice of lower-class life, our paranoid protagonist interprets genre conventions as clues, eventually wrapping himself in a mystery of his own making. The pleasure of Burning is to watch this character react in real time, processing behaviour, coincidences, and testimony, and after weighing the evidence, delivering his verdict. In this way, Lee’s film has been designed as an object to be argued with; structured around absences of incident and motivation, it remains open to speculation. By the end, we still don’t know what kind of story this is.

For many of my friends at Cannes, however, Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built is the film of the festival. Upon my arrival in Portugal, my family, who would be hard-pressed to name another film from Cannes this year, had already heard of this one’s controversial reception. Here’s the story, or so it goes: at the premiere of Jack, the previously banned and promptly forgiven von Trier was greeted with a 10-minute ovation. (I don’t think anyone used a stopwatch, so bear in mind the tendency to inflate these stats.) During the screening of the film, however, where multiple women and children are savagely mutilated, the celebratory mood dissipated and a good hundred or so walked out of the Grand Thèatre Lumière. Once again, bearing in mind that no one had a clipboard to keep a tally of the walkouts, we might see this reaction not in relation to the violent content of the film itself but to the man who brazenly put it there: von Trier, who was accused of sexual assault just earlier this year and would appear to be addressing the oft-cited objections to his cinema with this film.

The House That Jack Built is divided into “five incidents” and each one recounts a different murder by the eponymous character (Matt Dillon). Between each episode, Jack converses with an unknown narrator, Verge (Bruno Ganz), hailing from another dimension as the serial killer give us a selective retrospective of his oeuvre. (These incidents, he says, are indeed works of art.) The self-proclaimed masterpieces include but are not limited to: the killing of a hitchhiker with a car jack; the gunning down of a mother and her two children at a picnic in a remote field; and the brutal slaughtering of Jack’s long-time girlfriend, the victim with whom he shared the most intimacy and compassion.

Demented, Jack is a surrogate for von Trier; inquisitive, Verge plays the skeptical role of the viewer. As with Nymphomaniac, this film adopts an essayistic, if not entirely rhetorical, structure. With interludes where Jack and Verge discuss Gothic cathedrals, Goethe’s Oak, Glenn Gould, and Nazi concentration camps, The House That Jack Built aligns itself with this invented category of art, locating beauty in human suffering and hatred. Irredeemable or not, Jack fully embodies this notion as an abstract device. As he commits heinous acts seemingly beyond our capacity to comprehend, the nihilistic von Trier comes full circle and ends up looking like something of a deranged humanist: motivated by an unrepresentable sorrow, Jack, unable to act otherwise, represents his anguish in the only way he knows how to: through art. Morally challenging, The House That Jack Built invites us to see his work—and von Trier’s, by extension—as intimately intertwined with the humanity that would allow Jack, if possible, to live and love within the constraints of domesticated society.