Antichrist

Even before the Dogma ’95 manifesto and his banishment from Cannes in 2011, Lars von Trier was the leading enfant terrible of the film world. After learning his third film, 1991's Europa, had won three awards at Cannes but had not been given the coveted Palme d'Or, von Trier flipped-off the judges and stormed out of the awards ceremony. At the 2009 festival he also famously said "I am the best film director in the world.” There was a time that I might have agreed with von Trier's self-aggrandizing assessment. The “Europa Trilogy” included not only the wonderful Europa but his masterpiece Element of Crime and the underrated Epidemic. This creative burst also included the made-for-television movie Medea and his fantastic Danish television series The Kingdom. In roughly 10 years von Trier produced enough quality work for an entire career.

Although his films since that period have not quite been on the same level, von Trier's experimentation has always been interesting and extremely admirable in a world where film is often looked at as product and not art. As his public statements and actions make clear, von Trier does not shy away from controversy and often he seems to be courting it on purpose. He has been criticized for being a misogynist (Breaking the Waves, Antichrist) insensitive to mental disabilities (Idiots) anti-American (Dogville, Manderlay) and a Nazi (the 2011 press conference that led to his Cannes exile). Whether he is acting like a petulant child just trying to shock the establishment or is raising difficult subjects in order to bring them into the realm of public discourse is debatable. It doesn't matter to me either way because artists should provoke and sometimes disturb audiences and, whatever his motives, von Trier’s films are original and provocative.

Antichrist apparently started with von Trier’s idea to make a horror film, although this is by no means a conventional horror movie. A moving, slow-motion prologue in stunning black-and-white shows a child’s accidental death crosscut with scenes of his parents making love in the next room. Part one of the film, titled “Grief”, documents how the couple copes with their loss and guilt. Willem Dafoe plays the father, a therapist attempting to hold himself together while his wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is coming completely apart. (The characters are unnamed in the film so I will use the actors’ names.) 

Dafoe is not happy with the psychiatric treatment his wife is receiving and takes her out of the hospital so he can treat her himself. Dafoe’s therapy style is filled with new age platitudes like “whatever the mind can conceive and believe you can achieve.” His therapeutic methods seem shallow and inappropriate in the face of such a devastating loss. Dafoe is cold and emotionless while Gainsbourg is consumed by her grief and unable to function. After the couple struggle through much pain and anguish in the first section of the film, the husband convinces his wife to retreat to their isolated rural cabin in an effort to help her face her fears.

Part two, titled “Pain”, takes the couple across a literal and metaphorical bridge to Eden, the name of their cabin. This Eden will soon transform from an idyllic escape into a bloody battleground. In Antichrist nature is not renewing or cleansing but instead ominous and frightening. The couples’ time at the cabin is filled with images of decay and death. A baby bird falls out of a tree and is covered in ants, a doe has a half-born/dead fawn hanging out of her body, and Dafoe has a vision of a blood soaked fox who tells him “chaos reigns.” It is clear that for these people, as Gainsbourg herself says, “nature is Satan’s church.”   

Part three, titled “Despair”, and Part four, titled “The Three Beggars”, begins to delve into the topic of humanity’s long history of misogyny. It is revealed that Gainsbourg and her child had previously spent countless hours in this cabin while she worked on her master’s thesis, titled “Gynocide”. From the concept of original sin through witch trials to modern times, society has often defined femininity as monstrous. Now, after studying the barbaric acts against women through the centuries, she has started to embrace the idea that women are inherently evil. In its excruciating climax, Antichrist lives up to von Trier’s initial desire to create a horror film with brutal and surreal scenes of sex and violence. Far from the current exploitative horror trend of “torture porn”, this is real and visceral sexual violence that will leave you cringing. Gainsbourg and Dafoe proceed to inflict their inner pain upon each other and nowhere have I seen both the connection and dichotomy between sex and death so brutally enacted as it is here.

Antichrist will certainly shock and disturb viewers and those who do not like von Trier will find plenty of ammunition in this film to bludgeon him with once again. This film is not for the faint of heart and certainly not going to appeal to many casual viewers. However, underneath the graphic and exploitative elements of this film there is substance and Antichrist is the work of an artist struggling to make sense of life, love, grief and death in a very original style. Available from the fabulous Criterion Collection on both DVD and Blu-Ray.