Philadelphia Weekly

Half-genius, half-huckster, Danish bad boy Lars von Trier continues to confound. His most arrogant, insane confrontation yet, Antichrist is a film like no other. It’s provocative, sloppy and intellectually 
retarded—the entire picture feels like it’s sprung forth from the creator’s id without a second thought as to the consequences.

I’ve tried really hard to hate and dismiss this movie—I even endured it twice—but there’s no hiding from its idiotic power. Antichrist stays with you, even when it’s stupid.

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as “He,” and “She,” respectively. They’re first glimpsed having sex to Handel in black and white super slo-mo (complete with pornographic penetration shots) in the shower, not noticing as their toddler pulls a Clapton Junior and plummets out a five-story window to his death.


But their grieving is short-lived. All extras at the funeral find their faces blurred like unsuspecting folks who wandered into a reality television program, so that von Trier can narrow the focus down to “He” and “She” alone.


“She” is in bed for a month before “He” finally intervenes. He’s a professional therapist and thus, feels free to toss out her meds and embark on a more drastic, behavioral modification program. He’s also a condescending twat of a shrink, exercising this sick power over his wife in a way that can’t be good—especially since “She” keeps ripping off her drawers and masturbating vigorously just to spite him!


So Antichrist ’s battle of wills carries on, with Dafoe’s “reasonable, rational man” speaking in dull therapy lingo while his wild, crazy and not-quite-of-this-Earth wife ain’t really buying it. In this uncompromising, deeply ugly oasis, Dafoe meets all sorts of unnatural disasters, until one Fantastic Mister Fox shows up, chowing down on his own innards and muttering aloud: “Chaos reigns!”


There’s a hallucinatory chill to 
 Antichrist , when von Trier fixates on the deafening sounds of acorns hitting a tin roof as the harbinger of abortions and miscarriages, or when he concludes that nature itself is not a warm and welcoming thing but rather a chilly, ugly animal. The circle of life is a tangled thick of merciless greens, eating over the complacent.


As shot by phenomenal cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Antichrist ’s exteriors are all sickly pale-scapes stinking of dead forest rot. Amusingly nicknamed “Eden,” this garden is ugly as fuck. Photographed at infinitesimal shutter speeds, the film catches these two actors’ expressions at their most vulnerable.


Which is to say, holy shit. Antichrist goes there and then some, pushing the boundaries of genital mutilation in its third act to a point where you think somebody probably should have been arrested. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are too real … too good—the first time around I thought this was all really happening, and wanted somebody to call the police.


At one point Dafoe starts violently banging Gainsbourg against a tree stump, and as their rhythm picks up we see a den of shrieking corpses spawning up from around the old roots to join in—disembodied limbs reaching out of the ground. The vision is tacky, awful and comes from a nightmare very genuine and scary.


It gets worse, and even grosser. Sadly we only discover late in the film that “She’s” been working on a thesis called “Gynocide,” which doesn’t just rip off the “all work and no play” bit from The Shining , but also trivializes Antichrist ’s more thoughtful moments, until it finally becomes a movie about a mad slasher who pulverizes genitals. 


Not that it isn’t terrifying. (And frankly,
kids, there’s stuff here you never, ever want to see.) But Antichrist , particularly in its final moments, settles for so much less than it probably should have been.


The sicko punchline falls flat, slamming too neatly into a thesis where the rest of the movie felt so strangely unhinged. Still, Antichrist has been bothering me for months, even if I can’t quite get on board with it … yet. ■