Lars von Tri­er will return to TV for a third series of The Kingdom

Through the ​’90s, the Dan­ish great Lars von Tri­er broke up his steady out­put of con­tro­ver­sy-stir­ring, fes­ti­val-beloved fea­ture films with the occa­sion­al sojourn to the small screen. Between 1994 and 1997 there were two install­ments of his tele­vised minis­eries The King­dom, an odd career detour long regard­ed as a deep cut for auteur com­pletists, and pos­si­bly due for reassess­ment in light of today’s news that von Tri­er will resume the long-dor­mant project.

Today Vari­ety has announced that von Tri­er has writ­ten scripts with his reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor Niels Vørsel for a third series, a prospect planned near the release of the first two a cou­ple decades ago, but long since aban­doned. He’s pick­ing it back up for five episodes, one more than the pre­vi­ous allot­ment of four in both the first and sec­ond series, with an expec­ta­tion to pre­mière in 2022.

The series tracked the goings-on at Copenhagen’s Rigshos­pi­talet, known in Eng­lish as the King­dom Hos­pi­tal, where the expect­ed mor­bid­i­ty and vis­cer­al hor­ror of work in a neu­ro­surgery ward can often take on a para­nor­mal tinge. Boast­ing a sick­ly sepia col­or palette and a Greek cho­rus of dish­wash­ers with Down syn­drome, it tri­an­gu­lates the halfway point between Grey’s Anato­my and a Nine Inch Nails music video.

Both the first and sec­ond series were edit­ed into respec­tive five-hour films, the for­mat in which they played British and Amer­i­can cin­e­mas; even with an extend­ed run time due to that extra episode, it stands to rea­son that the new batch will even­tu­al­ly take that shape as well out­side of Den­mark, where it will play on the major net­work DR. When the new series runs, it will do so under the title of King­dom Exo­dus, a dis­tinc­tion sure to reignite the ​“is it TV or a movie?” debate cur­rent­ly rag­ing over Twin Peaks: The Return.

In clas­si­cal­ly Von Tri­er-ian fash­ion, the larg­er-than-life fig­ure has also includ­ed an offi­cial state­ment that sounds some­thing like a grim incan­ta­tion. We’ve repro­duced it in full below:

“Bor­ders come in many forms; they may be lines drawn with rulers on white paper (often invis­i­ble to who­ev­er chances to vis­it the actu­al geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions). The lines of the bor­ders may be illus­tra­tive, if not to say quite fic­ti­tious and down­right mean; they may be drawn in a soft, red col­or, prac­ti­cal­ly invis­i­ble, and per­haps even as a dot­ted line, almost as if indi­cat­ing an apol­o­gy or even – shame. Nev­er­the­less, the lines hang there in incon­ceiv­able num­bers, and togeth­er they con­sti­tute those ​‘ter­ri­to­ries’ that the inhab­i­tants are strong enough to defend. Enter­ing and leav­ing often entail vio­lence, for, of course, any vis­i­tor is expect­ed to return after end­ing his or her business.

“On Earth, the Machine that makes every­thing go round (all life, that is) is depen­dent on the con­flicts which the lines pro­voke, as if by design.

“Whether Exo­dus actu­al­ly means ​‘enter­ing’ or ​‘leav­ing’ depends on the angle from which the bor­der is observed, but the word sim­ply describes a large num­ber of indi­vid­u­als cross­ing a pen­cil-drawn line together.

“Why?….. There is an imbal­ance between good and evil! The lim­it has been reached, at least at the King­dom…. But I can­not tes­ti­fy that it will be easy and blood­less to pick the sev­en astral locks of the world simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with doctor’s blood.”

That’s just great – now we have to spend 2021 won­der­ing what it means to pick the sev­en astral locks of the world simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with doctor’s blood.