Creepy Critic: 'Antichrist' Review

Is it possible to hate the artist but love the art? This was the conversation I recently had with friends over dinner. Of course, Roman Polanski’s recent arrest by Swiss police was mentioned. And then I brought up Lars von Trier’s latest film Antichrist, which elicited controversy at the Cannes Film Festival and beyond.

A leader of the contentious (and oft called pretentious) Dogme 95, producer of hardcore porn (Zentropa) and self proclaimed best director in the world–von Trier is truly a man of extremes. People either hate him or think he’s an absolute genius. He has admitted to suffering from bouts of depression, which renders him incapable of working. In 2007 he even went so far as to announce it was possible he would never make another film. How appropriate that his next film would be Antichrist.

The film is made up of a Prologue and Epilogue—with four chapters entitled Grief, Pain (Chaos Reigns), Despair (Gynocide) and The Three Beggars. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are the unnamed couple that suffers the loss of their son after he plummets to his death from their apartment window while they make love nearby. After collapsing during the funeral, She is hospitalized and released into her husband’s care who tries to heal her using his knowledge as a therapist. To assist the healing process they eventually retreat to their forest cabin, Eden.

It soon becomes clear that Eden is a parallel universe where shadows reveal that everything in nature is perverse: a fox disemboweling itself, a stillborn doe hanging obscenely from its mother’s body, a crow that refuses to die. “I understood that everything that used to be beautiful about Eden, it was perhaps hideous,” Gainsbourg says at one point. “Now I could hear all things I couldn’t hear before; the cry of all the things that are to die.” The crescendo of chaos in nature mimics the collapsing fugue of sex and death as the couple figuratively devours each other. The horror of Antichrist transcends the most visceral and talked about moments. The impending rattle of wind among the trees, subtle camera tricks across a looming landscape and the way von Trier plays with absence is most unsettling of all. Our sense of time and place relies on fragments and missing pieces: flashbacks and photographs, bits of an argument, an envelope and journal.

Von Trier orchestrates gorgeous shifts between highly stylized bravura to a raw and anxious heaviness, somewhat reminiscent of the Dogme films. Still, during these moments, he’s carefully composing every frame—a nice compliment to the film’s soundtrack, which eerily guides you through the couple’s internal and external world.

Antichrist’s symbolic layers will prove too harrowing for some—leaving more questions than answers. Many have dismissed the film as misogynist and violent, but von Trier attempts to deconstruct these things, particularly through Gainsbourg’s character. Initially portrayed as helpless and broken, She reveals herself to be a grotesque caricature of the women she studies and predator of the man who sought to control her. Antichrist is haunting, allegorical and unhinged. Those who choose to accept the beauty of its flaws will be rewarded.