However, The Kingdom II, although not unenjoyable, is a relative disappointment over its predecessor. There is a certain ricketiness to the story. It comes with the distinct sense that Lars von Trier and Morten Arnfred are not so much continuing a story that is waiting to be completed than they are making the saga up as they go along. Many aspects of the original have undergone noticeable changes. The character of Dr Aage Krueger (played by von Trier regular Udo Kier) goes from the shadowy figure of a doctor who killed a young girl in the first mini-series to now become The Devil himself; the ghost ambulance from the first mini-series is now unconvincingly passed off as being a group of med students conducting daredevil bets. Most noticeably, the pivotal character of Mary, the ghost of the little girl that haunted the hospital in the first mini-series, is almost entirely dropped from the sequel bar a token dream appearance. Furthermore, the tone of the second series has changed somewhat – with the sidelining of the ghostly Mary and the sequel’s principal concentration on the more mundane fates of the various lead characters, the sequel loses much of the eerie sense of otherworldliness that hovered over the first series. Although there is some substitute in the bizarre scenes with Udo Kier playing a baby that has an adult head and a twelve-foot tall elongated body, wailing to his mother and the two cooing over the future they might lead together.

The Kingdom II feels at times overly long but it is largely carried by its sense of black comedy. The chief joy here is Ernst Hugo Jaregard’s hilarious performance once again as the conniving, disgruntled Swedish surgeon. There are some highly amusing scenes in his ongoing battles to avoid bailiffs or in his plans to zombify his rival that keep going wrong. Birthe Neumann has an extremely funny part as an overly efficient secretary who, after the decision that costs must be kept down by buying low denomination stamps, pops up to ask whereabouts on a letter entirely covered by stamps she is meant to place the address. Although the most hysterical sequence in the entire film is the character of a Jamaican faith healer who wanders in to heal a concussed Kirsten Rolffes and removes a large clump of bloody tissue from the back of her head and eats it, noting “It’s the next best substitute since they took the Vitamin C out of Danish beer.”

The biggest downside to The Kingdom II is the end credit ‘to be continued’ and the realisation that one has sat through another five hours with no end in sight and that this means another three years and another five hours to wait for the saga to be wrapped up ... if that. However, with the deaths of both Ernst Hugo Jaregard and Kirsten Roelffs subsequent to the film, the likelihood of that now seems slim.

The Kingdom was brought up and made into an English language tv series with Kingdom Hospital (2004) with a script from no less than Stephen King. However, this only adapted the first mini-series and pretended that the plot elements added on or explained in The Kingdom II had never occurred.

Lars von Trier’s other films of genre interest as a director are:– the decayed future film noir The Element of Crime (1984); Epidemic (1987), a peculiar meta-fiction about filmmakers making a film about a plague and hypnotism; Breaking the Waves (1996), an emotionally devastating film about a woman’s masochistic sacrifices for her husband, which eventually arrives at a fantastic climax; Antichrist (2009), a film about grief that spirals into madness and extreme torture scenes; and Melancholia (2011) about a new planet about to collide with Earth.