There’s nothing obvious about Lars Von Trier’s filmmaking. There’s irony aplenty, sure, along with the other standard tropes of the sophisticated artist: misdirection; idiosyncratic pacing and camera work; ambiguity; inscrutable characters; misplaced and/or unexpected humor; all the standard devices that cushion and separate the viewer from the action at hand, drawing his or her attention, instead, to style, manner, technique.
The net effect of these tics, in the horrific THTHB, does not soften the film’s ultimate impact. But they do build in breathing room between the blows. You see, Jack (Matt Dillon) is a quirky guy. He’s not only an engineer, a frustrated architect, and a serial killer. He also has OCD. Thus we are provided with the undeniably humorous image of Jack returning, again and again, to the scene of a just-committed murder, checking, again and again, for incriminating blood stains.
Then there’s the go-to tool for keeping the viewer in “it’s just a movie” mind: a protagonist who relates directly to the viewer, in this case proxied by Verge, a nonjudgmental confessor a la Virgil.