Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a movie that is going to (and already has) divide people. A lot of people who have seen this film fall into one of two camps – “This is pretentious art-house crap that makes no sense” or “This is a beautiful, deep, piece of visual art.” Myself? I think I fall somewhere in the middle.
Let me preface this with the following: I have never seen another Lars Von Trier film. I do not have any traditional background in film theory or analysis. I know only bare-bones information about Catholicism and religion in general for that matter. Still with me?
I’ve seen Antichrist two times now, which is in my opinion the minimum number of times you need to see this film before attempting to review it. It is a film that pulls me in multiple directions at once. My cynical side calls up snide comments about pretense, melodrama, and excess but there’s something about Antichrist that won’t let me give in to these ideas completely.
It’s a film of contradictions. It’s minimalistic and intriguingly deep at once. Or maybe it’s just one of those. I’m not sure. That’s at the heart of Antichrist‘s strengths – its ability to leave you questioning what you just watched.
During the film’s prologue, shot in super slow motion and high-contrast black and white with opera blasting, a nameless Man (Willem Dafoe) and Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) have passionate sex (complete with a penetration shot) oblivious that their young child has crawled out of bed and fallen to his death from a window.
The rest of the film is broken up into chapters, following the couple as they attempt to deal with their tragedy. Overwrought with grief and blame, Gainsbourg collapses during the funeral and ends up in the hospital for weeks due to her “abnormal grieving pattern”. Dafoe, a psychotherapist, insists that Gainsbourg return home and deal with her grief instead of masking it with pills. Through some intensive questioning, it is revealed that Gainsboug is most afraid of their cabin in the woods, named Eden, where she had retreated to the summer before with their son to work on her thesis about gynocide (defined here as the systematic killing of women over the course of history) . The couple goes there to confront Gainsbourg’s fear and hopefully return some normalcy to their lives.
Upon arriving at the “garden around Eden” (the woods), things start to get strange. Gainsbourg’s emotions and behavior become increasingly erratic. Dafoe sees a deer with an aborted fetus hanging out of its vagina and a self-disemboweled fox that speaks “chaos reigns”. Tension rises and falls with the couple – at one moment she’s screaming at him that “this (marriage) might not last” and the next she’s telling him how glad she is to be with him. All the while, the natural world around them behaves oddly – acorns relentlessly pound on the roof and the aforementioned animals make their appearances.
Equally as interesting as Gainsbourg’s emotional breakdown is Dafoe’s lack of one. Taking on the role of therapist, Dafoe is cold and seemingly unemotional about his son’s death. On top of that, Gainsbourg accuses him of being a detached husband and not supporting her thesis work, which she abandoned directly because of him.
Inevitably, Gainsbourg’s despair and apparently mounting (and justified by Von Trier) resentment of her husband drives the film to a conclusion featuring some of the most graphic sexual violence I have ever seen. There are a few sequences in Antichrist that make the rape scene in Last House on the Left seem tame.
Looking past the overt narrative, Antichrist is absolutely loaded with religious symbols stemming directly from Von Trier’s background as an atheist turned Catholic. I can’t pretend that I understand exactly what point he’s trying to make with these symbols but Antichrist is clearly a personal exercise for Von Trier. Several months before the film’s release, it was leaked that the ending indicated that the world was created by Satan instead of God. As a result of this leak, Von Trier changed the film. Still, if this concept is still relevant, I think Antichrist actually makes sense. Without divulging too many plot spoilers, it would seem that Gainsbourg is the embodiment of Satan’s wishes. As her character says “Nature is Satan’s Church” and “it’s in all of us”. It’s as if Satan won the battle and after studying gynocide for so long, she’s given in to her nature. Maybe it’s our inherent nature to give in to evil after we’ve suffered to such an extent. Is that what he’s trying to suggest?
On a more literal level, Antichrist can be interpreted as a film about depression. Von Trier famously suffered an extreme bout of depression while writing and filming Antichrist. He even expressed doubts that he would be able to complete the film or any other one ever again. Von Trier’s depression is manifested in Gainsbourg’s character. Also, the concept of depression helps to explain the sexual violence. Gainsbourg’s character comes to view sex as a disgusting thing because it indirectly allowed her child to die. Again, this film is more about the director’s inner turmoil than anything else, no matter what interpretation you follow.
In her review, Karina Longworth said that Antichrist “rides a very thin line between legitimate horror and total ridiculousness.” I couldn’t phrase this concept any better. Indeed, Antichrist (especially upon second viewing) is loaded with melodrama and directorial indulgences. Gainsbourg’s monologues are particularly poetic in diction, her speech pattern with no basis in reality. The prologue is so over-the-top that it borders cliche (I actually got mad at my girlfriend for laughing at this scene while I was trying to take it seriously but it made me take a step back and re-evaluate Antichrist).
Still, the entire film is a stunning spectacle filled with ideas and for that reason alone, it is a massive success. As ambiguous as Antichrist‘s ideas may be, they are many. In the end, it is a film that demands you to think about it or ignorantly dismiss it as empty trash – that’s an achievement in my eyes.
