The film is a lengthy, verbose and extremely tedious representation of two souls descending into hell As a psychotherapist, he tries to 'cure' her, while not tending to his own increasing fear that nature is cruel, if not downright Satanic.Īs they repair to their hut in the woods, ironically called Eden, he has visions of a deer carrying a stillborn faun and a fox that eats its own entrails and tells him 'Chaos reigns' - a line that is meant to be chilling, but is delivered with such preposterous solemnity that it invites laughter. The man, unable to express his despair at the death of his child, devotes himself to controlling his wife's more flamboyant emotions. The expressionistic visuals present images of naked bodies in torment that have a ponderously obvious affinity with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.īoth of Von Trier's characters are driven mad by grief. The film that follows is a lengthy, verbose and extremely tedious representation of two souls descending into hell. The black-and-white prologue is pretentious, bordering on kitsch and shows Charlotte Gainsbourg taking pleasure from sex while her baby son dies
It does nothing for the film except serve early warning that some sequences are going to be unnecessarily graphic. The effect of this clumsy insertion is not so much erotic as laughable. This features two body-doubles named Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship. The schizophrenic confusion of the film is foreshadowed in its prologue, a lustrous, black-and-white sequence of a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) making love, into which Von Trier tastelessly inserts a single shot of hard-core pornography. It is too slow and boring in its first two-thirds to appeal to fans of horror and pornographic erotica, yet too crude and violent in its final third to satisfy those who pride themselves on having an art-house sensibility.Īntichrist is a bonkers attempt to merge three extremely different genres - arthouse, horror and hard-core pornography Of all his films, Antichrist is the most openly, psychopathically hostile towards women.Īntichrist is a bonkers attempt to merge three extremely different genres - arthouse, horror and hard-core pornography - with predictably catastrophic results. It is partly because Von Trier has earned himself an unenviable reputation for misogyny through Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark and Dogville. So why did Antichrist arouse jeers and critical catcalls at Cannes, especially from the French, who are not easily offended? And why has it brought forth so many demands that it be banned? They have a lyricism and a milky, dreamlike quality that evoke memories of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom the film is dedicated. Parts of the picture are exquisitely crafted. Mad, bad and dangerous: Things take a nasty turn for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in Lars von Trier's Antichrist