Movie Review - Antichrist

Can you go to Hell for seeing a movie?  If so, it’s too late for me but you still have a chance.  Written and directed by Lars von Trier, Antichrist is the most perplexing movie I’ve ever seen, let alone reviewed.  Visually stunning yet repulsive to watch; psychologically intense yet morally reprehensible; a spectacular cinematic achievement that quite possibly should be seen by no one.  The film tells the story of He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg).  (You know you’re in highbrow “art house” territory when the characters’ names are pronouns.)  They are a married couple; he’s a psychologist, she’s an author.   In the opening scene, their toddler dies as a result of their inattention whilst engaged in “marital relations.”  The scene is beautifully filmed, bathed in blue light and perfectly edited to the strains of 'Lascia ch'io pianga' from 'Rinaldo' and climaxes (both literally and figuratively) in the death of their child.  Hang on to your hats, folks…this is as “cheery” as it’s gonna get. 

He, being a psychologist, convinces his wife to eschew the antidepressants prescribed by her medical doctors.  Instead, he will be her grief counselor even though he knows that no self-respecting professional would ever attempt to provide guidance to a family member.   He begins an intense round mental masochism, forcing her to discuss and relive the loss of her child.  Eventually he reaches the conclusion that they should continue these “sessions” in an isolated cabin, a locale where she once spent the summer alone with their child while she was writing her thesis on historical crimes against women.  Upon arriving, things hurriedly begin to devolve.  As her erratic, and increasingly violent, actions escalate, He begins to suspect that there is more wrong with She than simply grief.

While the film has nothing to do the “antichrist” in a literal sense, it’s most certainly a horror film.  However, unlike most horror films, this one focuses as much on the psychological as it does on the physiological.  Von Trier creates a sense of overwhelming dread and devastating foreboding that’s almost palpable.  The film’s sense of desolation and despair is unrelenting.  The characters’ (and the audiences’) psyche is battered and bruised long before the film’s brutality becomes bodily. 

While the entire film is psychologically exhausting, von Trier ups the ante in the final third by escalating the violence.  In short succession the film subjects us to three graphic, realistically photographed acts of extreme carnage; two of which were easily the most revolting things I’ve ever witnessed in a mainstream film.  Images so disgustingly vile that it caused me to do something I haven’t done at the movies since I was a child: I closed my eyes.  The scenes in question are so nauseating that they would be rejected as album cover artwork for most “death metal” bands.  There are things in this movie that make Saw look like Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.  It is extraordinarily explicit, both in terms of violence and sexuality.  The film merges sex and bloodshed and chronicles them in an unambiguous way that is typically only seen in pornography.  While I wouldn’t classify the scenes as pornography per se, the case could certainly be made; and never has the line been thinner.

I won’t be giving this film a number like I usually do.  Antichrist is polarizing and deliberately so.  Its purpose is to shock and divide.  It wants to photograph depravity beautifully and then repulse us with the juxtaposition.  I’m a big believer in judging a film on what it’s attempting to do.  It’s unfair, not to mention counterproductive, to hold Caddyshack to the same standards as Citizen Kane when they’re trying to achieve two separate things.  Using that logic, Antichrist is an unmitigated success.  It accomplished what it wanted to…but so do snuff films.  That doesn’t mean you should go see one.