Lars von Tri­er checks in for anoth­er stay in The King­dom with the first Exo­dus trailer

It’s been four years since Lars Von Tri­er last bestowed new work upon us with The House That Jack Built, and much like the anti­hero lead­ing that film, he’s spent that time lying in wait until the moment is right to strike. It seems like that hour will soon be upon us, with today bring­ing a first glimpse at the next major under­tak­ing from the Dan­ish enfant ter­ri­ble, which will return him to a set­ting he knows all too well.

The third series of Von Trier’s 1994 – 1997 TV minis­eries The King­dom got a teas­er this morn­ing, return­ing us to Copenhagen’s Rigshos­pi­talet, the same hos­pi­tal cours­ing with malev­o­lent ener­gy that housed the pre­vi­ous episodes. The new check-in titled Exo­dus will run on the Scan­di­na­vian stream­ing ser­vice Viaplay and Denmark’s broad­cast net­work DR this fall, with sales agents cit­ed by Vari­ety as being close to a world­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion deal, but the rest of us can whet our appetite for flesh with the clip below.

In it, an old woman with a haunt­ed look on her face saun­ters in from the park­ing lot back to the recep­tion area of the ER, as if drawn in by some inex­orable mag­net­ic force of super­nat­ur­al ori­gin. As she makes her way through the revolv­ing door, the cool blue col­or fil­ter warms to a Piss Christ-col­ored orange, the same dis­tinc­tive aes­thet­ic Von Tri­er fos­tered in the orig­i­nal series — we’ve reen­tered Hell.

This gaunt woman will be joined by David Den­cik (recent­ly of No Time to Die) and the hav­ing-a-moment Alexan­der Skars­gård as guest stars, along with a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of the orig­i­nal cast. The offi­cial log­line doesn’t shed much light on what any of them will be doing, how­ev­er: ​“The gate to the King­dom has opened, and impa­tient souls can now have a first look into the super­nat­ur­al and inex­plic­a­ble world of The King­dom, where the final bat­tle between good and evil is about to begin.”

What­ev­er that might mean, it will pre­sum­ably clar­i­fy Von Trier’s ear­li­er remarks about pick­ing sev­en astral locks of the world simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with doc­tors’ blood, though it’s also entire­ly pos­si­bly that it will not. In either case, fes­ti­val audi­ences in the fall can hope to get a sneak pre­view of an episode or two (of the five total) at Venice or per­haps Toron­to before they hit the air­waves to trau­ma­tize a new gen­er­a­tion of viewer.