A grieving Seattle couple who has just lost their child retreat into the woods they call Eden to try and ease their collective pain. He (Willem Dafoe) is a noted psychologist while She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has a humongous fear of nature and thinks it might have led to their son’s tragic death. What begins as a hopeful search for truth, reparation and harmony quickly devolves into anything but, a malevolent force beckoning with the potential to spell disaster for them both.

Nature comes alive in IFC Films' Antichrist

Lars von Trier has never made it easy for his audience. His best films like Europa, The Element of the Crime and Breaking the Waves are unafraid to push buttons and accuse their audience just as much as they take their own characters to task. They ask for a form of attentiveness that is close to indescribable, each and every scene an intricate piece of a puzzle that could ultimately have no final resolution. Assembly can depend on a variety of factors, and depending upon ones age, race, gender and orientation the line between von Trier the genius and von Trier the ignoramus are incredibly thin.

The same goes for his latest, and maybe most controversial, epic Antichrist. To call it a simple horror movie would be an oversimplification. To say it is a treatise on the male-female dynamic might be giving the director far too much credit. To say it is something someplace in the middle, however? Well, that’s probably wrong as well, but for my part I think that’s what I’m going to end up going with.

Von Trier does not give either character a name. He wants us to know them strictly by their gender, only by the way they relate to one another as grieving husband and wife. Giving them names humanizes them to a point that is intimate and personal while what the filmmaker wants is something more visceral than that. He wants his viewers to become his protagonists, to take up their visages for themselves and experience their journey as if inside the couple’s own skin.

But what is the point of it all? Or, more importantly, is there a point to it all? Sitting there I couldn’t help but wonder if all von Trier wanted to do was horrify me to the point of insult, to pile on inhumanity after inhumanity until I felt compelled to give up and walk out the door. There is a point where torture, mutilation and depravity become too much to bear, the auteur walking a pretty fine line teetering on the edge almost from the get-go.

To get to that point, however, one must make their way through about an hour of spectacularly photographed psychobabble. Separated into four acts (“Pain,” “Grief,” “Despair” and “Chaos Reigns”) as well as a prologue and an epilogue, the first two-thirds are all about building tension and setting mood. He and She discuss and debate, heading into a collective dream state that both of them spend time flitting in and out of.

I was perfectly fine with all the ominous setup taking place over those first 60 or so minutes. While the dialogue does tend to drip in a little bit of pretension, for whatever reason I still found it to fit the downward spiraling mood just about perfectly. There debates echo in terrifying truths, and while I’m still not entirely sure what the point of it all is to say I was any less fascinated would be a total lie.

There are images here that will undoubtedly haunt me for quite some time. Things are done with blocks of firewood, carpenter’s drills and a pair of rusty sowing shears that I can hardly bring myself to revisit. Scenes of animals snarling away why fetus dangles from its underbelly both shock and awe, and to even talk about the opening black and white aria of sex, tragedy and death would spoil its awesome power to devastate.

I do not know if von Trier hates women or not. I agree movies like Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay and this one have a level of feminine violence (both literal and metaphorical) that for some goes far beyond what is acceptable, even for cinematic narrative fiction. What I do not agree with is that this all just more of the same, that the filmmaker is doing the same thing over and over again just with differing genres.

What I believe is that von Trier, like Bergman, Goddard and so many before him, is obsessed with the dynamic that lies between male and female. He is fascinated with that relationship, intrigued by the nuanced multifaceted differences that make it so indecipherable. The man wants to know the unknowable, his violence an anthropological adventure all who experience it are virtually forced to read differently.

As the final haunting images of the Antichrist epilogue fade to black the horror isn’t so much that chaos reigns so much that the three emotions which came before it were allowed to fester and grow in the first place. This movie looks at the bonds between man and wife and then asks what it would take to, not just destroy them, but send them to a pit of Hell so sacrilegious even Dante would be at a loss of words to describe it. Von Trier has once again taken viewers to the brink. What they choose to do once they get there is entirely up to them. 

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4) 

Additional Links:

• Antichrist Theatrical Trailer