“Antichrist.” Fuck! What are we to make of this? It’s hard calling something one of the best films of the year that makes you feel the worst you have felt all year. Lars Von Trier has set out to make a film about madness and the horrible things humans do to each other and has succeeded more than just about any director this side of Werner Herzog or Brian de Palma. The best way to describe the awesomely titled “Antichrist” is to say it will cut you and that if you watch it you will hate life for a least a day after watching. And that’s a compliment! Watching it hurts but its the kind of hurt we need and the kind of hurt that I could not look away from. As director Lars von Trier tells his simple yet disturbing tale of humanity’s masochistic dark side he heaps layers upon layers of artistic formalism and his approach is jagged and obvious but the effect reached his approach is undeniable and, after your done, unforgettable. I hate that Trier’s dirty parable was so well made because this is also a film I instinctively want to reject and tell people to stay away from. It’s quite mad but there’s genus in its madness and there’s no getting around that.

“Antichrist” has only two characters, one a man and Other (capital o) a woman, who, by the end are both stripped of their humanity in almost every way possible including their gender markers i.e. gentiles. The man is a headstrong psychiatrist that seeks to enforce reason to chaos and the woman, his wife, is… um, crazy. During an opening sequence that is best described as a avant-garde horror commercial porn (classical music, slow motion, black and white, and, wha!!!, a shot of actual hardcore sex done by what I hope to dear god is body doubles), the couple’s son wakes up somewhere atop a hi-rise building, sees his parents having sex (in slow-mo!) and pulls a Clapton by heading straight for the window, falling to his death which is probably what I would do I if my dad was Williem Dafoe and I saw him boning my mom. Anyways, this tragedy sets off a chain of events that drives the mother to the point of Freudian madness (I have a hunch that she was a bit off before the accident) and, it goes without saying, in bad need of help. The interesting thing is that the “help” is what hurts. Is it a good thing or perhaps a horrible thing that her husband is qualified in ”helping” people with “problems.” A few dozen night-terrors/angry-sex-beat-downs later and the couple are off to the woods, a lake house called Eden. As a qualified therapist, the husband’s project and maybe even experiment becomes his own wife whom he psychoanalyses to death! She is stricken with a condition that is obvious in origins but mysterious in its symptoms. This vague and debilitating illness, depicted with haunting perfection by actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, dominates the narrative and, if you look at it in terms of gender issues, touches upon themes of male hegemony and witch trials. She tells him the woods are the first, make that second, thing she fears most in life so… yeah, off to the woods they go. Here, the film has all the makings of a genuine horror story. Horror fans take note, the “horror” is psychological, metaphorical, tonal and achingly poetic. There are no monsters or flesh eating viruses. And the Antichrist in question is not of the “Omen” variety. 

“Antichrist” is ripe with ostentatious imagery that claws at the screen and burns some nasty shit in your head that you won’t soon forget despite wanting to. Trees, hills, grass, animals, acorns, man made tools and of course the historical pictures depicting man persecuting women throughout the ages. The symbolism, allegories, Biblical metaphors, Freudian signs, surrealist imagery or whatever else you want to call what von Trier is doing here is handled with a most heavy hand but not unsuccessfully applied if you take the whole film into account. The story will be moving along in its own peculiar way and all of a sudden Trier will cut to a slow motion tableau or dissonant visual balled. Williem Dafoe for instance will be talking a walk in the woods while on the way to the couple’s cabin and, wham, his beautifully ugly mug (Trier makes great use of the actor’s amazing features) is now staring at the camera (and by extension us!) as the film cuts to strange and off-putting images of, say, a female deer giving birth as it trots away or a fox eating itself or a baby bird falling to its death. As these disturbing (in ways we can’t always place or consciously articulate) images wash over us the film further adds to the rich-to-a-point-of-choking atmosphere by cueing menacing, David Lynchian sound chords. These alienating, distorted and perhaps hallucinatory asides that characters experience occur more and more frequently once the couple in in their cabin until a point comes where the viewer realizes that the asides are now the norm because the weird shit has taken over the film completely. The film and its characters become consumed by the sadistic and controlling artist. So, then, let it be said that Trier is the monster of this horror spectacle.

The film has been called misogynistic and that is… bull shit. Film academics are so politically correct these days that if a film disturbs us we scramble to dismiss it or classify it as something outmoded or the work of an “angry white male” and, thus, unworthy of serious consideration. That’s sad because it prevents a real dialogue from taking place. Yet all this film wants is for such a thing to take place. Every second is a prod to the viewer be it a pin prick to our intellectual side or a full frontal assault on our sensitivities; Trier plays with the viewer’s instinctual impulse to both look away and yet also sneak a peek a horrible things. Like the fox consuming its own self from head to tail, its almost as if “Antichrist” wants the viewer denounce it because that only proves its point. At Cannes this year the film got an anti-award for its horrible views towards women. Okay, but the jury then awarded Charlotte Gainsbourg, the wife, with a best actress award (and rightfully so). So which is it, fuck-wads? While bad things happen to a woman, bad things also happen to a men and, I must add, women do bad things to men and men do bad things to women. In other words: bad things happen to people! 

If I haven’t referred to the characters by name it’s because they don’t have them: she (Gainsbourg) is called Her while he (Dafoe) is called He and the two make life a living and literal hell for each other. That’s practically the thesis of this piece! The film in other, simpler words, is in one sense about the evils we do to each other but is really about the evil we have inside us innately. In one intense scene (aren’t they all?) Gainsbourg says that nature “is the devil’s playground” and this theme is consistently evoked by Trier through the mise en scene. Pine cones drop like a-bombs, animals watch as if emissaries of the devil and dirt hits buried bodies like with w real feeling of organic weight. Like some twisted Werner Herzog film, nature does indeed have plans for the two. Nature is beauty and all-giving (a female trait) but it also destroys and kills (male). Above all, the film makes us see and FEEL that, while human nature is a force of darkness, its also natural. Humans at their core, and if viewed with human constructs such as logic and morality, are evil. If nature is the devil’s playground then human are the devil itself. The Jeckle and Hyde horror movie twist is that the monster was inside us all along.

During one of the many day dreams we experience a fox, after eating its own tail, turns to Williem Dafoe and actually speaks. ”Chaos reigns” he growls. I laughed at the ridiculousness of this absurd moment (which are not uncommon by the way) but at the same time was haunted by the lasting impression it left–one of surreal hopelessness and total consumption at the hands of the chaotic void from which we all spring from and perpetuate. As the final shot (which appears at first to be ants walking up a hill… except they’re not ants, they’re people–women to be exact) fades the parting line of the film is a dedication to Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. I laughed again here because it should have been David Lynch.

Grade: A