Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009): Denmark/US/France

Reviewed by Kevin Tran. Viewed at the IFC Center in New York, NY.

Lars Von Trier’s new film is a shocking piece of imperfect art. From the filmmaker whose work includes The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves, and Dogville, anything not shocking would be a surprise. But Mr. Von Trier has gone the extreme distance with his new film Antichrist , which stars Charlotte Gainsboug and Willem Dafoe.

She, played by Gainsboug, (both characters do not have names) a woman working on her thesis about feminist theory mourns the tragic death of her son, who falls out of the window in the film’s breathtaking opening sequence, filmed in high-contrast black and white and in slow-motion. The tragedy affects her immediately and it is brutalizing. He, Dafoe, is a psychotherapist who has no other choice than to treat his own wife and help her deal with her pain, grief, and suffering.

Gainsboug’s magnificent performance is displayed in the film’s early scene after the funeral. She looks drained and very pale. Her acting makes irrationality seem real and quite plausible as she contemplates suicide and goes through uncontrollable urges for sex to distract her from her grief. The suffering in that home is unrelenting and is contributed by Von Trier signature voyeuristic camera movement and jumpy editing.

But the plot of this film moves at a surprisingly good pace and the overall structure of the film is very neat as it is explicitly made known that it was written in four chapters. As He tries to help Her from her crippling panic attacks, He suggests that they make a list of what scares Her. The two then travel to a cabin in the woods, called Eden, where She has been before to research and write her thesis. A place where she felt most exposed and most scared.

The new location of the woods introduces the audience to a wide variety of bizarre, yet stunningly mystical images. Many of them very graphic or extremely explicit – both violent and sexual – and it only progresses more frequently as the advances forward. Von Trier creates a certain rhythm by switching back and forth from the realism depicted in the beginning of the film to more surreal, fantastical scenes that might be nightmares or hallucinations. They are lyrical – yet nonsensical, sometimes so extreme and absurd that they become comical.

Antichrist’s photography alone is something to marvel at. The entire film has a tone of various shades of dark blues and grays with violent splatters of red – clearly imitating the context of images. Using very dark subject matter, Von Trier tries to shake you up, as if he wanted you to keep the film after you were done watching it – and for some it does, but for me it didn’t. Still, I can respect the film’s beauty, which is also a nice consolation because the film’s climax is less than satisfying, now matter how puzzling or shocking it is.


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