Product Details

• Actors: Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Kirsten Rolffes, Ghita Nørby, Holger Juul Hansen, Søren Pilmark
• Directors: Lars von Trier, Morten Arnfred
• Writers: Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel, Tómas Gislason
• Producers: Ib Tardini, Ole Reim, Peter Aalbæk Jensen
• Format: Color, Content/Copy-Protected CD, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: Danish (Dolby Digital 2.0)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Koch Lorber Films
• DVD Release Date: November 8, 2005
• Run Time: 272 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000AYYV74
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,808 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Kingdom - Series One (Riget)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The Kingdom defies categorization. This cult Danish miniseries plays like a nightmarish cross between Twin Peaks and Chicago Hope as directed by David Cronenberg, and even that hardly captures the giddy absurdity of Lars von Trier's soap-opera-cum-horror-tale. The setting is a modern hospital built on a medieval graveyard, but the most terrifying ghosts belong not to ancient history but rather to the hospital's own dark past. An egotistical, self-righteous visiting Swedish doctor, who abhors the Danes and screams his outrage in nightly rants from the hospital roof, presides over this ensemble of eccentrics; but he's hardly the strangest this hospital has to offer. ER has nothing on this delirious madhouse, where haunted ambulances, a Masonic cult, a devil cabal, demons, ghosts, and a most mysterious pregnancy lurk in the fringes of more earthly (though equally bizarre) melodramas. Shooting in video with a bobbing handheld camera, von Trier creates an otherworldly atmosphere with the dimly lit corridors and bland, drained color schemes, set to an eerily sparse soundtrack of echoing hospital sounds and electronic wailings. The mix of deadpan hysteria and spooky ghost story concludes with the most outrageous cliffhanger put on film (to be continued in The Kingdom II). (The home video also includes closing comments by a smiling von Trier himself, unseen in the theatrical version.) Simply put, you've never seen anything quite like this. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description

Acclaimed director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) delves into the world of the supernatural with the acclaimed series that inspired Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital. At The Kingdom, Denmark’s most technologically advanced hospital, a number of strange and otherworldly events begin to occur, much to the dismay of its doctors and patients. A ghostly ambulance appears and disappears, the voice of a little girl calls to a patient in an elevator shaft and a doctor’s fetus begins growing at an alarming rate.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful series marred by production defect on Koch/Lorber DVD, November 27, 2005

By 

dooby - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kingdom - Series One (Riget) (DVD)

I agree that this is a brilliant series filled with black humor, pathos, social satire and horror. Set in and actually filmed at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, it is essentially a ghost story, a haunting, but told in a quirky, refreshing way. One can see why it attracted Stephen King and inspired him to write his subsequent novel "Kingdom Hospital." It certainly deserves all the 5 stars it gets at this site.

However there is a problem with the DVD edition issued by Koch/Lorber. On Disc Two, Episode 3, during the scene where Helmer enters the Central Archive after Mogge, the picture suddenly skips (at just after 39mins) to a part of the movie that is actually from Episode 1 on Disc One (the scene where Helmer's nose is being patched up). This sequence from the previous Disc then goes on for about 2 minutes before you suddenly switch back to the current episode but several minutes later with Dr Mogge already out of the Central Archive and running for his life. You are left wondering what happened in between.

This is not a problem with an individual disc. Replacing the disc makes no difference because they all have the same flaw. It is a production issue. It probably occured during the video-editing or mastering process. How this could have been passed for release is beyond me. I know Fox Lorber's previous reputation for producing shoddy DVDs but after the name change and several fairly good early releases under the Koch/Lorber label, I actually believed they had reformed. Alas not. This kind of sloppiness is wholly unacceptable. Koch/Lorber goes into the same black book as its disgraceful predecessor. If it had any conscience, Koch/Lorber would order a recall and replacement. But with this company's reputation, it's hardly likely. Hopefully the rumors are right and Criterion will pick this up for release in the future as part of a Lars von Trier retrospective.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fix For Disc Two Error, February 3, 2006

By 

Dennis West "dw963" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kingdom - Series One (Riget) (DVD)

Like other reviewers I found an error 39:11 into Disc Two. If you have purchased this movie and have such a problem Koch Lorber is aware of the error. You can get in touch with them through their web site www.kochlorberfilms.com
I sent them a brief message explaining the problem on a Sunday afternoon at 4:42 and by 6:18 Monday morning had received a very polite response from Jason Vitteritti ([e-mail]) - That's not a typo, the address on the email read "kochent", not kochnet like you might expect.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was by Wednesday I had a new disc two with no errors so as far as I'm concerned Koch Lorber rules!
Oh, and Riget is awesome too.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece encompassing many kingdoms, January 17, 2004

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Kingdom [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The Kingdom is the name of a gargantuan decaying hosital in Copenhagen where this amazing Lars von Trier Gothic television miniseries is set. of course, the title also refers to the kingdom of Denmark (in the staff meeting room where many scenes take place, the portraits of Queen Margrethe and her consort are prominently displayed), for which the hospital is a metaphor, and for the kingdom of society in general. And, as von Trier explains in his charming afterwords to the episodes, it also refers to the kingdom of the imagination itself.

The miniseries works on all these levels. It's a quirky, incredibly atmospheric study of the hospital centering upon the discovery of the ghost of a girl murdered 75 years previously on the same site haunting the hospital, and it revolves around a giant cast of dozens of memorable characters, all of whom are intensely sympathetic even though they're pretty miserable human beings. The three at the core of the story are a malingerer, the septuagenarian medium Mrs. Drusse, obsessed with discovering the story behind a ghost; a blackmailer, the young and sexy Dr. Hook; and his nemesis in the neurology department, the jaw-droppingly arrogant brain surgeon Dr. Helmer, who had to take this job in Denmark (which he loathes) after being cast out of a job in his native Sweden under suspicion of plagiarism. Although the Gothic aspects to the story are beautifully brought out by the labyrinthine deserted basement hallways of the hospital and Von Trier's gorgeous sepia-tinted cinemtography, like all the best ghost stories the ghosts here serve as metaphors for what's wrong with the state of society in general. The miniseries is an amazingly funny satire on the dilapidated Danish health care system, and the film's funniest moments involve the attempts of the neurology department's manager, the marvelously manipulative and passive-aggressive Professor Moesgaard, to implement a hilariously inane PR campaign called "Operation Morning Air" that involves (among other things) having the neurosurgeons cheerfully sing introductions to one another at staff meetings.

The series has often been compared to "Twin Peaks," but it's probably even better. Like the Lynch series it does a marvelous job of conveying atmosphere, but it is deeper and more carefully engineered and imagined. Though there are moments that sag (including the disastrous idea of having Dr. Helmer visit Haiti near the end, which jarringly breaks the miniseries' adherence otherwise to the Aristotelean unities by and large), as a whole it is a genuine masterpiece. It is one of the richest works for television ever made.