Antichrist (2009): C

Aiming to incite shock and outrage with Antichrist, Lars von Trier instead merely produces numbing indifference. Working from a template that strongly recalls that of Don’t Look Know, the Danish filmmaker’s latest begins with an overwrought intro – shot in look-at-me slow-motion and black-and-white, and scored to classical music – in which a husband (Willem Dafoe) and wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) screw in the shower and on the couch (penetration imagery included, thanks to body doubles) while their son tumbles out of his crib and takes a fatal leap out of their apartment window. This trauma is earth-shattering for the couple but von Trier’s deliberately self-important aesthetics strip it of any emotional impact, and thus negate any potent poignancy and horror from the couple’s subsequent trip to a remote Pacific Northwest cabin. There, von Trier alternates between bickering-couple scenes and hallucinatory super-slo-mo panoramas of Gainsbourg sleepwalking through what turns out to be an unholy forest. Dafoe and Gainsbourg commit to their at-odds characters, with her guilt and anger at him amplified by his cold, clinical psychiatric attempts to help her. Yet they’re not characters but merely emblems mired in von Trier’s semi-serious goof-off, which alternates between laughable stabs at biblical import (the forest is really called Eden?) and cathartic/destructive violence (highlighted by the already notorious bit of below-the-waist mutilation). Antichrist only sporadically feels like an effort interested in grappling with the miserable fallout from tragedy, with its wannabe-scandalous provocations creating a situation not where “chaos reigns” (as a talking fox memorably claims), but rather one in which silliness abounds.

The 47th New York Film Festival

Comments

[Anthony]

I too saw it at the New York Film Festival. Overall, I thought it was a complete mess of a film, but seeing it in a packed theater with the audience reaction made it sort of 'fun.' I also thought it was a fairly effective psychological horror film for about 2/3 of the way. For some time, it even felt like it was going make a statement on grief or loss, but it ultimately just came off controversial for controversy's sake.

[Mark Eustace]

Saw it at the Toronto Film Fest. I suppose having already heard and read various opinions on the film when i saw it saved me from the film's initial shock value. However i did not find it to be very controversial in its images. I do not take Von Tier or any self rightously artistic filmmaker too seriously enough to have been offended by what i essentially understood, upon first viewing, to be an angry work by an angry artist. Other than its excellent visual and audio execution that really does owe almost all of itself to past significant horror films (Kubrick!), there is no credible point to the film other than Von Tier taking out his personal fustrations on squeamish and easily offended viewers. All that said; i still quite liked it and will watch it again someday.

[CW]

I don't see why everybody talks only about the controversial values of this movie. Controversial to whom? I think it is a good, if somewhat flawed, horror movie, that is beautifully shot and manages to bridge the gap between Algernon Blackwood and Tarkovski.