Article: Antichrist

Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" Reviewed

by Salvatore Brown

     “Antichrist” is a movie about a therapist and his wife whose infant son tragically falls to his death as the two parents engage in incredibly graphic, slow-motion, black-and-white, operatically scored sex acts in their shower, up against a wall, and then finally in bed. This is how the thing starts at least, and every scene following is equally strange and similarly rendered in stunning detail and artistry by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.

     Lars von Trier’s film does do some things very well, as would be expected from the acclaimed adventurous writer/director. The casting and acting are superb. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (simply “He” and “She” in the credits) play the “man who thinks he can fix all his family’s problems on his own” and the “mysterious and distant grief-stricken woman” extremely well. The actors’ performances, combined with gorgeous visuals, clever and unconventional directing, and strong scripted dialogue, give this art-horror flick sufficient power to shift everyone’s mood in the audience firmly to bad, and then inescapably to bad and… weird. The film is a perfect mood piece. But the brilliant performances are restricted by gender-archetypal characterization. Dafoe’s psychotherapist is a man who defies everyone’s advice and believes he can cure his wife’s grief on his own—his mission starts to become more about his “case” than his family. If that’s not typical Hollywood man behavior then I don’t know what is. Gainsbourg is quiet, frail, and sad, with lots of explanation-defying, out-of-masculine-reach issues going on beneath the surface. Also sound familiar?

     Antichrist is perhaps also doomed to suffer as a film because of its loyalty to the world of dreams. As in: it looks and feels perfectly like a dream, and very little of any of it is explained. It revels in the ambiguity of nightmares. To me the vague and generic allusions to witchcraft, astrology, the bible, and gynocide were too unclear to warrant credits in good storytelling; Willem Dafoe’s climactic investigation into his wife’s research on witch-hunting and the occult yielded little more than a few creepy ink drawings of demons in leather-bound books and some demented handwriting indicating his wife’s psychosis. As in so many typical horror films, a cursory “research” scene with dusty books supposedly provided enough supporting background knowledge to bolster the inclusion of some grisly violence. I couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated by this. But on the other hand, admittedly, I was already scared long before Mr. Dafoe gets around to finding out just how nuts his wife really is. In short, the powerful success of the mood element buoyed the film’s weaker points.

     But you're always less critical on the second viewing. Seeing Antichrist for the second time I made a point not to analyze it as a film, but as the convention-slaying art project it seems to want to be. And yes, the damn thing is a beautiful piece of paranoia and anxiety-- an artificial panic attack. But, misogyny? Oh yes, lots. Gore involving genitals? Mmhmm. However I wouldn’t call the movie decidedly misogynist, simply because of how archetypal it is: it is about a man not understanding the female psyche. Granted, the female psyche in question is pure evil, but the film never denies the reality that it is heavily focused on a historical and irrational masculine fear of the feminine-- in fact it reinforces the idea. All of this contributes to the film’s aura of mystique (within the theater and outside of it), which, above all, it achieves unerringly. The film is a beautiful, frightening, subtle-yet-not-at-all, quiet-loud, shocking, nightmare/meditation on a muddled, modern amalgamation of vagina dentata and castration anxiety. Leave the kids at home, especially the boys.