The Antichrist Experience

*** This review contains minor spoilers ***

The reactions from Cannes were positively tantalizing. “The most shocking film in the history of the festival.” “You have to see it to believe it.” “I found myself reaching around the edges of my chair looking for a seatbelt.” And so forth. The audience was split down the middle, as is the norm with highly controversial films (The Passion of the Christ is balanced at an even 50% on Rotten Tomatoes; Antichrist is at 49%). Usually it boils down to how much brutality people can stomach, and since horror is my forte, I expected to fall in with the positive crowd. With acclaimed director Lars von Trier’s latest, all signs pointed towards a tour de force of awesomeness that I couldn’t wait to experience for myself.

Two hours later, I left the theater feeling cheated, drained, and irritable.

Antichrist tells the story of a nameless couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their young boy in a tragic accident. Her grief becomes so overbearing that she can scarcely function, and attempting to ease her pain, her husband takes her to a solitary cabin the woods where she used to spend time with her son – a place aptly called Eden. From here, the narrative is put on the backburner, and the excursion becomes a bizarre exposé of sex, misogynism, religious metaphors, and haunting images of nature’s simple beauty juxtaposed with its visceral barbarity. Despite the husband’s best therapeutic efforts, his wife’s grief gradually turns to violent dementia. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for either of them.

Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009).

Throughout the screening, there was constant laughter from the audience. Not laughter of enjoyment, but of perplexity and discomfort. Moments intended to shock or horrify were delivered in such an over-the-top fashion that they collapsed in on themselves, rendering them pointless and oftentimes comical.

Antichrist is more like an experiment in film rather than a film itself. The narrative – much like The Passion of the Christ – is not the focus; it’s more like an invisible clothes line on which von Trier hangs elaborate sequences of pseudo-artistic overindulgence, fragmented every so often by shaky-camera exploitation shots that feel like they were conceived by an angry, wrist-cutting film school dropout rather than a brilliant Danish director. The film never gets past its rough draft stage, and as a consequence, whatever artistic potency it might have harbored is lost.

Von Trier himself admitted that much of the imagery featured in the film was inspired by dreams he had. And that’s what the experience of watching Antichrist is like. A dream.

Or rather, a nightmare. Even the grimmest films have moments of light – a joke here, a smile there – small fragments of relief to ease the burden, if only by a little. This one doesn’t. Antichrist is bleak beyond bleak, dark beyond dark from the first frame to the last. Von Trier paints this canvas pitch black, and doesn’t give the light an inch, not even for a second. The widely-panned gross-out moments of the film come towards the end, one featuring Willem Dafoe’s (rather disgusting) penis ejaculating blood, another an extreme close-up of Charlotte Gainsbourg snipping off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. And even these, believe it or not, underwhelmed. They were definitely cringe-worthy, don’t get me wrong. But bear in mind that I’ve seen animals being cut open and eaten, a penis being sheared off, even an extensive human autopsy. So von Trier doesn’t really raise the bar in terms of gore, I’m sorry to say. But it is the first time I’ve seen a vagina that big on screen, so I’ll give him that.

Todd McCarthy’s review in Variety referred to Antichrist a “big fat art-film fart.” That’s pretty much spot-on. What should have been a perfect merger of the slasher/horror genre with the hypnotic beauty of von Trier’s earlier work instead ended up being an epic embarrassment on almost every level. Still, despite its overwhelming flaws, a Best Cinematography Oscar would be more than deserved, as the film is mesmerizing to watch throughout. Performances by Dafoe and Gainsbourg were solid as well.

If von Trier’s intention was to make a film that people would remember, then he succeeded, albeit not so admirably. The Antichrist experience will stick with you for a good long while, whether you’d like it to or not. Yet, however overwhelming my negative attitude towards the film is, some sick, depraved part of me is tempted to re-watch it. Such a chaotic tumult of thoughts, images, and emotions overwhelming the senses all at once made it so perhaps a second try might sit better, as some films often do, especially ones requiring a greater investment of thought.

So I hope, perhaps in vain, that buried somewhere deep within this regrettably-botched experiment is a great film.

But for now, my advice is to stay far away from Eden.

Zach Copeland is a Senior Writer for The Film Crusade.