There are certain movies that, though true works of art, are simply
unpleasant to watch.
Antichrist is not, for most of its duration, one of those
movies. It’s ceaselessly compelling, and though the final sequence is
as gruesome as anything in modern cinema (or at least as gruesome as
anything outside of the murder-porn genre), Antichrist is
nonetheless a subtle film that relies more on building tension than
graphic displays of gore.
Still, that final sequence is over the top, so I warn you: If you
don’t want to see extreme violence, overly realistic depictions of
dismemberment or cathartic insight inspired by psychoanalysis, you
should avoid this film.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a woman who apparently doesn’t like to
wear clothing that covers her genitals. While she and her husband
(Willem Dafoe) are having sex, their infant son escapes from his crib
and falls out the window of their apartment. At her son’s funeral, she
collapses and falls into a deep depression.
Her husband decides that, since he’s a psychotherapist, he should
treat her. Learning that her panics and anxieties are heightened when
she thinks about the woodland cabin that they own, he takes her there
for some exposure therapy. This turns out to be a bad idea, in almost
precisely the same way that invading Russia in the winter is a bad
idea.
That’s pretty much the plot. What makes Antichrist tick for
its 104 minutes is the relentless inventiveness of Lars von Trier in
making tiny moments intensely, uncomfortably evocative. Part of this is
attained through cinematic technique; as She (Gainsbourg is credited
only as “She,” and Dafoe as “He”) experiences panic attacks while
thinking about her son’s death, or the darkness of the woods, or the
chaos in which we all live our lives, the image distorts like a
funhouse mirror. There’s almost no music, but there’s a frequent, low
bass rumble that sounds like something from a David Lynch film.
Actually, there’s an overwhelming Lynch-like quality to
Antichrist, which is odd, because nothing von Trier has done
before (like Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Breaking the
Waves) looks at all Lynchian. But in Antichrist, the camera
zooms into holes in the dirt, fixates on close-ups of mottled skin and
does everything but settle into a severed ear. Meanwhile, the ambient
noises are like a bad dream that Angelo Badalamenti had after eating a
squirrel.
There’s also a mythic motif; Gainsbourg’s character is fixated on a
nonexistent constellation called the Three Beggars, comprised of a
deer, a fox and a crow. These animals slowly work their way into the
woodland cabin where He and She are going increasingly insane. They’re
named Grief, Pain and Despair, and they seem to be demanding some sort
of sacrifice.
But rather than have these animals or spirits overwhelm the film
like horror-movie apparitions, von Trier has them appear briefly, and
naturally. In one of the most harrowing sequences, Dafoe sees a deer
that has incompletely given birth, its stillborn fawn half-dangling
from its hindquarters. The animals aren’t exactly ghosts or demons.
Instead, they seem to be symbols of how deeply wretched the natural
world is. Dafoe wakes up covered in ticks; baby birds fall from trees
and are eaten by ants; bloody beasts of prey lurk in tall grasses.
This all seems to relate to the dissertation that She had been
writing. Titled “Gynocide” (i.e., the murder of women), it begins as a
study of male cruelty. However, as She becomes consumed by her studies,
she starts to think that it’s simply the natural state of humans to be
horrendous, and that women are not just victims of this; they’re also a
source of evil.
Von Trier does create some ambiguity here as to whether he’s
commenting on sexism and violence against women, or simply indulging in
sexism and violence. However, the fact that his target is a
women’s-studies scholar, and precisely the kind of person who has
protested against von Trier’s sexism in the past, makes this seem a
little transparent. The big reveal at the end, followed by the most
unpleasant use of rusty scissors I’ve ever seen, probably crosses the
line, then underlines the line, then circles it and draws arrows
pointing to it and sends out telegrams telling people where the line
was and precisely when von Trier crossed it.
Still, with von Trier’s impressive ability to string out the
suspense and dread without violence, and the amazing camera work from
Anthony Dod Mantle (28 Days Later, The Last King of Scotland),
who makes some of the smartest use of high-def video the medium has
seen, Antichrist is tremendously successful in its bare
aesthetics.
Antichrist still might be worth hating, in the way you’d hate
the Saw movies if they were made by a genius who’s capable of
creating something inspiring but instead has chosen to hold up a mirror
to the worst aspects of the human psyche, break the mirror, cut himself
with the pieces and then fling the blood onto the screen, somehow
painting a perfect replica of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,”
which then comes alive and eats your children.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2009.