Review: Antichrist

She smashes his testicles with a hunk of wood and masturbates him, fyi.

Submitted by mike, 11/12/09 4:43 PM

A husband and wife (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as He and She) suffer a loss. Their child falls from a window while they have sex in another room, and the wife enters a deep depression. After a month in the hospital, the husband, a therapist, tells his wife that he’s suspicious of the quality of therapeutic care that she’s receiving, and takes her home to treat her, himself

He favours “exposure therapy”, and suggests they spend a week away, seeking catharsis at what she identifies as the source of her greatest fear: a cabin in the woods, called “Eden”. From there, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist gets a little nuts. He is the perfect caricature of rational male competency, She is the self-loathing, cruel embodiment of decay and violent entropy. They battle, they inflict shocking (a word not used lightly in 2009 when referring to the state of the moviemaking world), brutal and explicit violence on each other and themselves.  Nature is revealed to be satanic, empty and ill-willed. Chaos reigns.

It’s a film carefully concocted and designed to polarize its audience, massively and baldly anti-woman, on its face. The film played at Cannes this year, and received a special “anti-award” from the Ecumenical Jury that recognized it as “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world”. It’s a pyrrhic form of provocation by Von Trier – to assume that any of the woman’s actions in the film can be ascribed to sincere opinions being expressed by a filmmaker working from “the heart” is on reflection pretty silly. He’s playing at misogynist, he’s disingenuously donning the why-would-anyone-want-it mantle of brave male artist speaking against female wickedness, to bring down the furor upon himself, and make his critics like the Ecumenical jury look ridiculous to those in-the-know enough to realize Antichrist is a put-on, a “troll”, someone casting a rod into the sea of churning opprobrium looking for a bite. At least I hope it is.

Aside from that, the film is a glory. It’s by leaps and bounds the most beautifully lit and shot film that I’ve seen in years. There are a handful of remarkably well-executed shots, camera moves and scenery that combine to be literally breath-taking, coldly deft and chilling all the more so coming from the director that helped bring us the daffy, muddy aesthetic of Dogme 95. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are both spectacular, Gainsbourg in particular as the yo-yoing, dangerous wife able to go from pathetic to snarling and stalking the forest in a heartbeat. Dafoe’s He is subjected repeatedly to the incomprehensible assaults of raw nature, and he is able to transmute the ridiculous – a talking, self-disembowelling fox – into something estranging, something sublimely terrifying. Where von Trier (seemingly) set out to make a polarizing political and sexual drama, he has succeeded in the related goal of making a profoundly chilling horror film, one that invents its own grammar and masters its frame and everything in it with such complete command that its hyperviolence, misogyny and gratuitous excess (I am not exaggerating) is transformed into a deeply othering, eldritch weirdness, a perfect placid wrongness, and one of the best films of the year. 9/10