Movie Review: AntiChrist

This is not a movie that believes in moderation. This is not a movie that believes that violent images are best left to the imagination or that less is more. Let us be clear: this is a movie that shows in extreme close-up a women cutting off her own clitoris.

It may seem petty to begin a review of a movie which definitely has serious issues on its mind by pointing to its most brutal moment, but that moment and others like it are what linger in the mind. Director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) has a well-earned reputation for artistry, but he also has one for being a provocateur. He has never shied away from material that is uncomfortable, disturbing, and shocking. Does the material here merit images like that described above, or are they shown merely to provoke?

Antichrist does not lack for ideas. It takes as its subjects nothing less than grief, pain, despair, women, and the chaotic nature of the universe. The plot is bare-bones. In the beginning, a couple is making love. Their infant son crawls out of his crib, sees them, climbs onto a window-sill, and falls to his death. The couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg and referred to only as He and She respectively, are stricken with guilt and grief. They retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods so that they might work through their pain, but it is here that their relationship becomes increasingly violent and strange.

On one level, Antichrist is about two people punishing each other for their son’s death. He is a therapist and tackles the problem analytically, burying his own feelings to focus on his wife’s pain. He puts her through a battery of tests that are as much about exacting vengeance as they are about making her face her fears. She reacts more directly, becoming sullen and angry and getting him to engage in rough, painful sex. There is a lot of sex in the movie, and it is mostly graphic and violent. It is why She eventually does what she does to herself, to rid herself of the thing that cost her child’s life.

Or is it? Between all the interpersonal drama, von Trier weaves in a series of mythic images and themes. Acorns falling on the roof. A deer, a fox, a crow. It is eventually revealed that before her child died, She was doing research on feminine oppression throughout history, and the conclusions she draws may shed some light on what happens in and around that cabin. Is it the result of the bottled emotions of two wounded people? Is it the natural expression of her inherent evil, or is another presence at play, something more uncaring and omnipotent than either of them are prepared to deal with? The movie gives no clear answers, but it does get the mind humming and the senses pounding. It is difficult if not impossible to deduce what von Trier intended, but the movie’s most powerful images stay intact, to be picked at and probed, long after the final frames flicker away.

What is certain is that the movie is made with impeccable craft. Von Trier employs a number of techniques, from black-and-white film to slow motion sequences to handheld shots and more, to expertly tug our senses one way or another. Whatever its excesses, the movie is never boring to look at. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are both extremely good in a pair of nebulous roles that require them to engage in behavior many actors would balk at. He and She spend much of the movie stripped emotionally naked, but they are the only center we have in von Trier’s morally murky universe. Dafoe and Gainsbourg give risky, powerful performances both.

Gainsbourg’s performance is never riskier than when She mutilates herself. The movie has bided its time up to this point building a desolate and hopeless atmosphere. These people are not getting better. They are not getting over or even facing their problems. They are discovering horrible new sides to themselves and finding out just how much cruelty they are capable of. She’s mutilation is the final expression of this hopelessness, but it is merely the capper to a long and painful journey from which von Trier offers no reprieve. I stepped out of the theater exhausted. Antichrist is not a movie that believes in moderation. It believes only in extremes, but that means that it can affect an audience like few movies can, even if they aren’t ready for it. See it at your own risk.