Directed by Lars von Trier. 109 minutes.
Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Released by IFC Films.
Lars von Trier’s new film is meant to poke and prod its audience, even long before one of its two characters is poked and prodded by sharp instruments. It’s an Ingmar Bergman film as directed by Eli Roth, although the film is dedicated Andrei Tarkvosky, a move which provoked boos and hisses during the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. But it’s easy to see how von Trier was influenced by the great Russian director, especially in the eerie slow motion shots of haunted landscapes as well as the cryptic religious overtones that dominate Antichrist.
Von Trier apparently told actor Willem Dafoe - who makes us nearly fifty percent of the film’s cast, that is, if you don’t count a falling infant, a fox, a deer, a crow and two porn actors who stand in for Dafoe and Gainsbourg’s loins in the picture’s opening sequence – to watch Tarvovsky’s The Mirror before production on Antichrist began. Perhaps von Trier’s film holds up a mirror to his own fears, phobias and self-proclaimed depression.
The film is part horror film, part European art picture, part whacked-out nature feature and all von Trier. The director ratchets up feelings of dread throughout the film’s prologue, four chapters and epilogue – a stylish flourish he borrows from his own Breaking the Waves and Dogville – with Lynchian outbursts of garbled feedback on the soundtrack, eerie Tarkovskyan slow motion sequences and an occasional dab of blurriness that creates a sense of the overall confused nature of Gainsbourg’s character.
This is not a film for everybody. Even aside from the hardcore sex that opens the movie and scenes that close it, which include a bloody orgasm, a steel object being driven through a character’s leg and a graphic female castration, Antichrist is rough viewing. Its tone of burgeoning madness, its heavy symbolism, the verbal abuse between its two leads and the overall depressive nature of its proceedings could make even the more hardened cinematic veterans run for the exit. At Manhattan’s IFC Center, a sarcastically placed cliff notes for the film tells viewers exactly when they should flee the theater right down to the minutes.
All that being said, Antichrist is an impressive piece of work. The film, shot by Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot Dogville and Slumdog Millionaire, is gorgeous to look at. The haunted woods of Eden, Dafoe and Gainsbourg’s character’s lodge in the wilderness somewhere off the beaten path from Seattle, are equally horrifying and breathtaking. The film’s prologue, which finds Dafoe and Gainsbourg in the throes of intercourse as the laundry routinely spins through its cycle behind them, is the sort of opener that could yield smirks, but the beautifully-shot slow motion sequence is a testament to von Trier’s showmanship. Then, tragedy strikes – the couple’s toddler falls out of their high rise window and hits the snow-covered pavement.
The picture is then divided into four chapters: Grief, during which Dafoe, a psychologist, attempts to ‘cure’ Gainsbourg of her anguish and guilt over the death of their son; Pain, during which Dafoe convinces Gainsbourg to accompany him to Eden, which she has sited as the place of which she is most afraid (“Can’t I be afraid without giving you a definite object?” she responds to his authoritative questioning); Despair, during which Dafoe’s efforts at Eden backfire; and The Three Beggars, during which said efforts continue to backfire and Gainsbourg becomes some sort of embodiment of Mother Nature as imagined by Satan. References are made to Gainsbourg’s previous summer at the lodge, during which she studied the atrocities committed against women accused of witchcraft, including, you guessed it, a steel instrument being rammed through a leg. By the film’s end, she herself is committing those atrocities.
Von Trier provides no answers to the malevolent force which overtakes Gainsbourg. Is her literal warfare a reaction to the emotional and psychological warfare waged upon her by Dafoe’s psychiatrist? Did Dafoe attempt to control Mother Nature and, in turn, receive his comeuppance? Or does chaos merely reign as suggested by the film’s self-cannibalizing fox. If you haven’t heard already, don’t ask. The thing is, von Trier is not taking the piss, as it were. He’s a provocateur, for sure, but Antichrist is neither a stunt nor the work of an artist gone mad. It’s good for a shock, but it’s far from schlock.
The film’s performances are fearless and often downright frightening. Von Trier is known for pushing his actors to the limit – Nicole Kidman said she would probably never speak to him again after Dogville and Bjork’s stomping off the set of Dancer in the Dark and disappearing for several days is the stuff of film legend. The stars of Antichrist take it up several notches and I’m curious to see how they readjusted to the world following the film’s completion. At Cannes, a jury went so far as to give von Trier an anti-award, of sorts, for working into a frenzy its delicate sensibilities, I suppose.
Antichrist is not one of von Trier’s masterpieces – Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville – but nor is it one of his follies – The Idiots or The Boss of It All. It’s an intense piece of work by a director allowed complete control over his vision. It’s a powerful film. I doubt any viewer privy to it would not be affected in one way or another.