A Very Positive Review from InContention.com

REVIEW: “Antichrist” (***1/2)
Posted by Guy Lodge · 10:01 am · June 23rd, 2009
(Edinburgh International Film Festival)

“I am the greatest director in the world,” Lars von Trier declared in an already notorious Cannes press conference following the unveiling of “Antichrist” in May. Unable to resist such shameless baiting, most critics either responded with affectionate exasperation (“Oh, Lars!”) or, as one suspects von Trier preferred, tomato-faced indignation.

What few did, however, was entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth. It’s a conclusion that, even on the imperfect evidence of “Antichrist,” this viewer is willing to consider.

Few contemporary filmmakers are as adept at arousing feeling as Lars von Trier – by which I refer not merely to the ingenious media-provocateur act he performs to market his work, but the actual excesses and polarities of emotion he mines within his own cinema.

Von Trier’s best films arouse equal measures of devotion and resentment because they engage human empathy with no concessions whatsoever to conventional artistic standards of restraint or good taste; like their psychologically frail heroines – Bess in “Breaking the Waves,” Selma in “Dancer in the Dark,” Grace in “Dogville” – they teeter on the brink of self-destruction simply because they feel too much.

I must slightly temper that argument upfront by admitting that “Antichrist,” as mercurial and bruising as it so often is, is not one of von Trier’s very best. Though it by and large meets the criteria described above – and its unnamed anti-heroine is a fascinating, near-parodic amalgamation of physical traits and psychological symptoms from all the director’s women – it lacks the emotional breadth of “Breaking the Waves,” or the formal and ideological conviction of “Dogville.” Unusually for von Trier, for all the film’s sledgehammer brutality in its concluding chapters, it’s rather coy about what it actually wants to say.

Confrontational title aside, “Antichrist”’s religious undertones never move beyond implication; its sexual politics may be more explicitly referenced (its female protagonist is a women’s studies student, after all), but its findings there are no less nebulous, and frequently quotation-mark enclosed. I find it remarkable, in other words, that many at Cannes could take so much offense to a film with such an oblique, imprecise world view. It suggests that the film’s greatest accomplishment – and it’s no minor one – may be as a sounding-board for the individual viewer’s own insecurities.

What does lift “Antichrist” into the upper ranks of the director’s work is the hitherto unmatched mastery of craft that he wields here. If von Trier the rhetorician is slightly subdued on this occasion, von Trier the filmmaker has never been more brazenly, exhilaratingly alive.

The film’s concluding dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky may have inspired jeers from the Cannes crowd, but the delicacy and occasionally oppressive immaculateness of its imagery sustains the connection; indeed, several sequences, most notably an early, milkily-lit dream-walk through the woods in a character’s mind, seem indebted to the Russian filmmaker’s balletic visual sensibility.

Elsewhere, von Trier’s calculated imbalance between form and function in a scene – as in the perplexing prologue which pairs a young baby’s grisly death with his parents’ ecstatic coitus, both elements bound, and rendered emotionally inseparable, by a soaring aria on the soundtrack and hyper-stylized, perversely gorgeous monochrome lensing – is a stylistic trick all his own.

Quite to what thematic end this scene, like so many others in the film, achieves its aim is something one may need further viewings to determine. What’s plain on first sight is that von Trier, working with a career-peak Anthony Dod Mantle (here making his lovely, Oscar-winning work on “Slumdog Millionaire” appear positively juvenile by comparison) has constructed the most beautiful, atmospherically textured film of his career.

What is it actually about? This much we know: following the aforementioned death of their infant son, a couple retreat to their remote forest cabin. Rather than nurse their bereavement together, the husband, a psychologist, embarks on a rigorous series of psychological exercises to cure his wife of her “atypical grief pattern,” to discover that she is actually crippled by a fear of “nature.” (It is initially unclear whether it’s landscape or human nature of which they speak; it emerges that the concepts are inextricably linked.) We learn that the woman previously visited this cabin with their son to work on her thesis, a critical study of gynocide – mass murder of women – and an archaic belief that the female sex embodies evil.

However, whether via personal guilt or psychological disorientation brought about by her husband’s relentless mind games, she comes to believe the misogynistic theories she previously spent her academic life dissecting. Her new-found conviction of her own innate evil brings about the concluding bloodbath of which everyone now knows the intimate details, if not the emotional context.

Those who have accused the film of being some kind of misogynist tract are hastily assuming that von Trier’s and his protagonist’s academic rejections mirror each other, and, more crucially, missing the fact that he portrays her husband’s passive-aggressive attempts to compartmentalize her emotional patterns as every bit as inhumane as the rather more physical violence with which she responds. It’s obvious his sympathies lie with her, though in an interesting development that shows a maturation in female characterization on the director’s part, she’s not as blamelessly martyred as Bess, Selma or Grace: a flashback late in the film positions the woman as intriguingly complicit in her son’s death.

Meanwhile, even the most vociferous doubters of the film’s gender alliances would be hard-pressed to deny the physical alertness and emotional acuity of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s startling performance, which utilizes her gawky physique and uninflected voice to a rawly sensual effect we haven’t previously seen from the actress. Effectively buttressing the more emotionally extravagant turn means Willem Dafoe’s work is destined to be undersung, but the film remains resolutely a two-hander, with each star impressively playing off the other’s impulses and vulnerabilities.

In fact, for all the Grand Guignol dazzle of the final act, many of the actors’ (and the film’s) most impressive interludes come from the quasi-Bergmanian chamber drama of the film’s first half, where the pair verbally dissect the symptoms that will become manifest later on. Von Trier’s tonal discipline here is so unexpectedly tight that when the film turns on its head by launching into wildly playful metaphoric territory (with the arrival of the now infamous talking fox), it doesn’t feel like a filmmaker losing control so much as exerting it. Far from the gratuitous torture-porn decried by some, the film’s latter half is a surprisingly witty deconstruction of horror-cinema tropes, from the textbook body-horror inner-made-outer motif of Gainsbourg’s self-executed clitoridectomy to Willem Dafoe’s gender-bent inhabiting of Carol Clover’s “final girl” theory.

Abetted by richly evocative sound design and Mantle’s consistently jaw-dropping compositions, “Antichrist” therefore registers less as a religious, sexual or social exercise than as a purely cinematic one, a bravura filmmaker at the peak of his formal powers showing them off in a range of genre outfits.

It may not haunt to the degree of his previous masterworks, but for its ideological ambiguities and occasional superficialities, it’s by turn affectingly earnest, gleefully silly and – whisper it soft, mind you – rather a lot of fun. Fans and haters alike may be inclined towards a line from many a marital argument less visceral than the one that concludes “Antichrist”: It’s not what you said, Lars, it’s the way that you said it.

Most divisive film of the year coming up?

quote:

Originally posted by puxzkkx:
Most divisive film of the year coming up?

Yeah, I would think so...

Probably the most, but White Ribbons is going to be right up there.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Probably the most, but White Ribbons is going to be right up there.

That's typical of Haneke work though, right? Though I think most were against Funny Games USA from the start...

Ebert made some really great blog posts about this film. I'll post them ASAP.

Cannes #6: A devil's advocate for "Antichrist"
By Roger Ebert on May 19, 2009

Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, "Antichrist" is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere of Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" and its castration scene. I said I was looking forward to von Trier's overnight reviews, and I haven't been disappointed. Those who thought it was good thought it was very very good ("Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect"--Damon Wise, Empire) and those who thought it was bad found it horrid ("Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist"--Todd McCarthy, Variety).

I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that. After his "Breaking the Waves" premiered at Cannes in 1996, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice fled to the rest room in emotional turmoil and Janet Maslin of the New York Times followed to comfort her. After this one, Richard and Mary Corliss blogged at Time.com that "Antichrist" presented the spectacle of a director going mad.
Enough time has passed since I saw the film for me to process my visceral reaction, and take a few steps back. I can understand why this confrontational film has so sharply divided its early critics. It is fascinating to me that there's a sharp divide between American, Canadian and British critics monitored by the Tomatometer, and a cross-section of French critics monitored by Le Film Francais, a French equivalent to Variety, which is published daily at the festival. Reflect that French critics are often noted for more intellectual, theoretical reviews, and American critics are more often populist. Which group hated or approved of the movie more?
Think again. A surprising 44% of the early Tomatometer critics gave positive reviews. Le Film Francais asks its national panel to vote on every film in the Official Selection and the Un Certain Regard section. They can vote as follows: (1) Must win the Palme d'Or; (2) Three stars ("Passionately"); (3) Two stars ("Good"); (4) One star ("One likes it a little"); (5) "Pas de tout"--"not at all"). The French critical consensus for "Antichrist" is... pas de tout. I can't recall when another Official Selection by an important director has been disliked so strongly.

A reader signing himself Scott D posted this comment after my first entry on the film: "If it is in fact the most despairing film you've ever seen, shouldn't it be considered a monumental achievement? Despair is such a significant aspect of the human condition (particularly in the modern western world) so how can this not be a staggeringly important film, given your statement?" There is truth to what Scott D says. In the first place, it's important to note that "Antichrist" is not a bad film. It is a powerfully-made film that contains material many audiences will find repulsive or unbearable. The performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are heroic and fearless. Von Trier's visual command is striking. The use of music is evocative; no score, but operatic and liturgical arias. And if you can think beyond what he shows to what he implies, its depth are frightening.

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw "Breaking the Waves" that von Trier's sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man's Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.


If you have to ask what a film symbolizes, it doesn't. With this one, I didn't have to ask. It told me. I believe "Antichrist" may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier's version of those passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world.

The Prologue, a masterful sequence lovely b&w slow motion, shows a couple, He and She, making love while their innocent baby becomes fascinated by the sight of snow falling outside an open window, climbs up on the sill, and falls to his death. This is Man's Fall from Grace. Consequently, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) falls into guilt and depression so deep she is hospitalized. That is one half of Original Sin. The character named He (Willem Dafoe) insists she cut off her medication. He will cure her himself. That is the other half. Her sin is Despair. His is Pride. These are the two greatest sins against God.

He and She go to their country home, named Eden. He subjects her to merciless talk therapy, relentlessly chipping away at her rationalizations and defenses, explaining to her why she is wrong to feel the way she does. I suspect many of the reviews will focus on the physical violence She inflicts upon He in the next act of the film. It is important to note that the earlier psychological violence He inflicts is equally brutal. He talks and talks, boring away at her defenses, tearing at her psyche, exposing her. Listen to Dafoe's voice in the trailer linked below. It could be used for Satan's temptation of Christ in the desert.


There is little sense at Eden of real lives together; He and She they are locked in combat that seems their inescapable destiny after the loss of their child. The violence in the film is explicit, but is it intended to be realistic? I don't believe you can have a hole drilled clean through your leg, an iron bar pushed through it, and a grindstone bolted to it, and do much other than be in agony. That He can even speak, let alone crawl into the woods, contend with her and defend himself, is remarkable. I think the violence illustrates the depth of her venom and that She, like He, will stop at nothing.

Images suggesting Bosch are evoked toward the end of the film. Human limbs rise up to grasp He and She as they have sex. There is a talking dog, bluebirds, a deer, inhabiting the world of Man. At the end He stands atop a hill while a legion of unnatural humans ascends toward him, evoking "Night of the Living Dead." The suggestion is Biblical, but not from the Bible we know. The human figures are not naked, climbing toward birth, but clothed, climbing toward death. After their fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve learned shame, and covered their nakedness. In this evil world, they are created covered, and by their sins are cast out into nakedness.


Von Trier's original intention, it's said, was to reveal at the end that the world was created by Satan, not God: That evil, not goodness, reigns ascendant. His finished film reflects the same idea, but not as explicitly. The title "Antichrist" is the key. This is a mirror world. It is a sin to lose Knowledge rather than to eat of its fruit and gain it. She and He are behaving with such cruelty toward each other not as actual people, but as creatures inhabiting a moral mirror world. As much as they might comfort and love each other in our world after losing a child, so to the same degree in the mirror world they inflame each other's pain and act out hatred. This would be the world created by Satan.

If I am right, then von Trier has proceeded with perfect logic. Just as a good world could not contain too much beauty and charity, an evil world could not have too much cruelty and hatred. He is making a moral statement. I'm not sure if he's telling us how things are, or warning us of what could come. But I am sure he has not compromised his vision. He has been brave and strong, and made a film that fully reflects the pain of his own feelings. And his actors have been remarkably courageous in going all the way with him.

In his own defense here at Cannes, von Trier has described himself "the greatest director in the world." Well, if Le Film Francais says he is merde, what can he be expected to say? He is certainly one of the most heroic directors in the world, uncompromising, resolute. He goes all the way and takes no prisoners. Do I believe his film "works?" Would I "recommend" it? Is it a "good" film? I believe von Trier doesn't care how I or anyone else would reply to those questions. He had the ideas and feelings, he saw into the pit, he made the film, and here it is.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dr. McPhearson,

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Probably the most, but White Ribbons is going to be right up there.

Critical reception has been overwhelmingly positive on this one, I'll wait and see how this board responds to it.

quote:

Originally posted by puxzkkx:

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Probably the most, but White Ribbons is going to be right up there.

Critical reception has been overwhelmingly positive on this one, I'll wait and see how this board responds to it.

I'm really interested to see it, honestly. I didn't think I'd find myself saying that, but I am. Hope it comes to Chicago. I'll definitely buy a ticket, and hopefully I can decipher at least half of the symbolism contained within it.

Haneke is one of my favorite contemporary directors, so I'm really excited for Das Weisse Band... but what remains to be seen for me is whether he can top Cache and the original Funny Games (both of which are part of my Top Films of All Time list).

O yay! Heneke and Lars von Trier...I cant wait (rolls eyes).

quote:

Originally posted by babypook:
O yay! Heneke and Lars von Trier...I cant wait (rolls eyes).

Haha. I'm right there with you.

I don't know what side of the fence I'll land on with Antichrist, however - a lot of people I know and trust on message boards like AD and YMDB have seen it and loved it, but a lot of critics I like despise it. I myself consider "Dogville" a masterpiece, I quite liked "Dancer in the Dark" but I loathe "Breaking the Waves" with every fibre of my being, so I have no idea how I'll respond to this.

A ** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

Depending on your reaction to the cinematic outrages perpetrated by Danish director Lars von Trier (remember Dogville?), you might want to add or subtract two stars from the halfway (half-assed?) rating I just gave Antichrist. At film festivals from Cannes to New York, audiences at Antichrist who don't hoot, holler or throw things tend to walk out in a huff. That'll happen, I guess, when a movie begins with a therapist (Willem Dafoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) ****ing like rabbits while their toddler (unseen by them) falls out a window to his death. It gets worse when the couple retreat to a woodsy cabin, ostensibly to heal. The wife, like a force of ****ed-off Mother Nature, indulges in genital mutilation on hubby and herself. What to say? The images will singe your eyeballs. Dafoe and Gainsbourg, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, fill the screen with ferocity and feeling. But von Trier is royally screwing with us, especially when an animatronic fox confronts Dafoe in the wilderness and announces that "chaos reigns." Like we needed a fox to tell us that. Von Trier says he was suffering from severe bouts of depression when he shot the movie. See Antichrist, and you'll know the feeling.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen and I am no Lars von Trier hater. It is miserable, meaningless and sadistic.(It's also hugely and undisguisedly misogynistic - women will hate, hate, hate this movie.) I also don't understand why Charlotte Gainsbourg received the Cannes prize for this performance - unless the jury confused running around and screaming like a banshee with acting. Which people often do.

My prediction - there will be a morbid curiosity which will bring lots of people into the theaters (like it did me) and then most will leave and wish they could punch LvT in the face.

quote:

Originally posted by R2684:
This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen and I am no Lars von Trier hater. It is miserable, meaningless and sadistic.(It's also hugely and undisguisedly misogynistic - women will hate, hate, hate this movie.) I also don't understand why Charlotte Gainsbourg received the Cannes prize for this performance - unless the jury confused running around and screaming like a banshee with acting. Which people often do.

My prediction - there will be a morbid curiosity which will bring lots of people into the theaters (like it did me) and then most will leave and wish they could punch LvT in the face.

Just give me a chance. I have been wanting to punch Lars Von Trier for a long, long time.

A positive review from Anthony Lane in the NEW YORKER...

It would be a shock if “Antichrist” had turned out to be anything but shocking. After all, the giving of offense has long been the stock-in-trade of its writer and director, Lars von Trier, the man who brought us “Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” and “Dogville.” This year, the new film was jeered to the rafters at the Cannes Film Festival, although the energetic snagging of attention is as hallowed a Cannes custom as the hiking of prices in the local seafood joints. Better by far to see the movie now, and thus to establish, under less seething conditions, if the provocation was indeed a mere flourish of perverse P.R., or whether it remains an essential part of some more solemn design.

We begin at the deep end, with copulation and death. An unnamed man, listed in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe), and his wife, otherwise known as She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), are in the bathroom of their family home, busy doing It. This is a rapturous occasion, shot in glittering monochrome, featuring slow-motion closeups of the conjugal act, and stirred by the dolorous strains of a Handel aria. “May sorrow break these chains of my sufferings, for pity’s sake,” the libretto tells us: a curious invocation—we expect joy, not sorrow, to perform that task—and one that von Trier is only too eager to obey, closing the sequence with the orgasm of the adults and, simultaneously, the fatal fall of their young son, who climbs to a window and drops into the snow-thickened night. Because their attention was distracted by desire, their grief will be compounded and crazed by guilt.

At this point, we shift into color, although anyone expecting the director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle, to revisit the hot hues of his previous film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” will be disappointed. “Antichrist” is set in Seattle and the wilds of the Northwest, as far from Mumbai as can be imagined, and the glum interiors—the bathroom where the couple made love is now a scummy blue—compete for desolation with the great outdoors. Our first hint that the natural world will be a wellspring not of pastoral ease but of mystification and threat comes at the heroine’s bedside, in a clinic; she lies there, leaden with loss, while the camera closes in on the stalks of a well-wisher’s flowers in a vase next to her—rotting stumps of green, in a swirling murk. Her husband, a psychologist, takes her home and tells her not to dodge her distress but to meet it face to face. “Will it get worse?” she asks. “Yes, it will,” he replies. He asks her to nominate the place where she is most afraid. “The woods,” she says, and so into the woods, for the rest of the film, they go.

“Antichrist,” whose title I don’t claim to understand, is split into chapters, with headings like “Despair (Gynocides)” and “Pain (Chaos Reigns).” It would be hard to prove that these mean much, or refer to any cogent structure in the film. At best, they are a mocking mirror of the steps undertaken in therapy, and one thing that rises from “Antichrist” is a disdain for the limitations of the shrink. There are more things in heaven and earth, the film suggests, than are dream’d of in our psychology, and there is true venom in the wife’s voice when she says to her spouse, “I never interested you till now. Now I’m your patient.” What is more, the savagery that has earned the film its noisome reputation begins only after she has announced, “I’m cured, I’m fine.” Civilizing science, in other words, has done its duty and withdrawn, allowing the bestial—that part of humanity which lies beyond the reach of reason—to emerge and flex its jaws.

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By this time, He and She are in Eden, their secluded shack in the countryside. Call me fanciful, but I think the name is on the loaded side, for it is here that the fall of man and the collapse of woman take place, and where the landscape, its trees as lopped and blasted as those on a battlefield, looks anything but prelapsarian. A fox lies bleeding in the long grass, which rustles like the suburban lawn at the start of “Blue Velvet”; a startled doe runs off with a half-born fawn still swinging from her rump; a chick, splayed on the ground but not yet dead, swarms with marauding ants. The humans, too, are under siege: first from acorns that rifle onto the roof like bullets and from weird spores—is that what they are?—that smother the man’s hand when he wakes in the morning, and, second, from each other. For every promise of affection, there is a snap of wrath, and the woman who declares, “I love you, darling,” is the same person who, not long after, fetches a drill to bore a hole in her beloved’s leg, plus a pair of scissors for herself. If you have eyes, prepare to shut them now.

A word to the squeamish: there is no shame in leaving as the tools—and I use the word advisedly—come out. In a way, you will be getting the best of “Antichrist,” which until now has been a film of awkwardness, confusion, and great beauty. I see no reason to ally oneself wholeheartedly either with those who despise von Trier for his horrific silliness or with those who revere his ambition. Both have a point, and the problem is that von Trier, even at his most objectionable, can summon a wealth of images that defy explanation. I am thinking of the forest, at night, and the couple, unclothed and entangled, amidst the gnarled roots of a tree, with white hands sprouting from the earth as if to drag them down; or of the woman alone there, pleasuring herself in a kind of fury, with the man—and his paltry pleasures—no longer required.



At Cannes, the film received two prizes: one for Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Best Actress, and a scornful anti-trophy for von Trier, awarded for misogyny by the Ecumenical Jury. How the two should be squared I am unsure. The movie certainly shudders with a terror of female power, and the last thing we see is a monstrous regiment of women, their faces blanked out, streaming up a hillside, like the nightmare of a Puritan preacher. Yet so plain is Gainsbourg’s dramatic dominance, as opposed to her place in von Trier’s mad ideological scheme, that she carries the tale with a conviction barely hinted at in the script. Dafoe is game but wearily baffled, as if he were only just realizing what he signed up for, and how it adds to his list of screen punishments: first he had hot wax dripped onto his sternum by Madonna, in “Body of Evidence,” then he suffered the intense humiliation of being beaten up by Tobey Maguire, in “Spider-Man,” and now he has a log being used as a battering ram on his private parts. Even Madonna would have frowned at that.

The worst aspect of the violence here is not so much its methodical nastiness, or even its taint of exhibitionism (“Gaze upon this, if you dare,” von Trier seems to say), as the way in which it debases the milder but more serious acts of aggression in the earlier scenes. The couple’s lovemaking, after the child’s demise, has an edge of extremity that is both upsetting—the woman bites the man, and later asks him to hit her—and dangerously credible. To my eyes, this is the one area in which “Antichrist,” so often ridiculous, makes sense: as a study of the kinship between loss and lust. Few subjects are trickier to approach. A. D. Nuttall, in “Shakespeare the Thinker,” published posthumously in 2007, argues that when the newly widowed Lady Anne, in “Richard III,” yields to the advances of the disfigured hero she is “compliant not so much in spite of her bereavement as because of it.” Then, there is Gerald, in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” stealing into Gudrun’s bedroom three days after his father’s funeral: “into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again.” Some hope. Cinema has given us the married couple, stricken by their daughter’s drowning, in “Don’t Look Now,” who can still take an audience aback with the urgency of their grappling (might they be trying for another child?), and Nanni Moretti, in this year’s “Quiet Chaos,” who is numbed by the passing of his wife at the start of the film, but who jolts himself awake toward the end, with a strenuous bout. In each case, the equation is simple: the pulse of life, felt most strongly in sex, is greater than the terrifying zero of death.

The same applies to “Antichrist,” with a twist: it was sex that led to death in the first place. That’s why the movie is so self-involved, and leaves you fighting for breath, and why I believe von Trier when he describes the whole thing as a “dream film.” That would account for the want of logic, for the claustrophobia, and for the incantatory manner in which details loop round and recur. I can no more rid myself of the memory of the wife, in a glowing white dress, crossing a moonlit bridge, than I can of Arthur Rackham drawings in a book of fairy tales from my childhood. I feel the same way about the fox in the film; without warning, it speaks, and most people giggle at the sound, but we accept something similar in “Peter and the Wolf,” so why the derision here, since von Trier is clearly carving out a fable? Maybe that should be his next challenge: a PG rating. Skip the mutilation, stay in the woods, and make as strange a film as possible for kids. We can take it. ♦

A pan from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...

Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist." As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images that might have impressed even Hieronymus Bosch, as the director pursues personal demons of sexual, religious and esoteric bodily harm, as well as feelings about women that must be a comfort to those closest to him. Traveling deep into NC-17 territory, this may prove a great date movie for pain-is-pleasure couples. Otherwise, most of the director's usual fans will find this outing risible, off-putting or both -- derisive hoots were much in evidence during and after the Cannes press screening -- while the artiness quotient is far too high for mainstream-gore groupies.

Admittedly made in the wake of a severe depression two years ago that left the director wondering if he'd ever be able to shoot another film, "Antichrist" starts with a stunning rendition of a tragic domestic occurrence. To the accompaniment of a Handel vocal piece on the soundtrack, gorgeous slow-motion black-and-white widescreen images record how a toddler falls to his death from a high apartment window on a snowy day while his oblivious parents make love nearby. Mindful to warn viewers that they can never know what they're going to see in a von Trier film, the helmer obliges by sticking one hardcore insert shot in this sequence.

Dividing the narrative into four chapters bracketed by the prologue and an epilogue, the helmer switches to color as the mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg)leaves more than a month's hospitalization and enters into the care of her husband (Willem Dafoe), a professional therapist. In one of her quieter moments in this chapter, entitled "Grief," the woman triggers a calm argument, accusing her mate of indifference over their son's death, even as she assumes responsibility for it. So capably does the man seem to guide his wife through her trauma that the line becomes blurred as to whether he's functioning more as husband or therapist, as he semi-jokes, "Never screw your therapist," when she gets frisky.

After the woman is pushed to confess that she's most afraid of their property deep in the forest -- where the she spent part of the previous summer alone with her son -- that's where hubby take her. This chapter on "Pain" actually charts the woman's self-proclaimed recovery, but ends unpromisingly with a disemboweled fox rising out of the ferns to announce, "Chaos Reigns."

The ante is upped, and a climax of sorts is achieved, in "Despair," reassuringly subtitled "Gynocide," and if one is uncertain as to what the latter means, rest certain von Trier will graphically illustrate it. Suffice to say the woman's mental health takes a turn for the worse, she vividly pleasures her man in a conspicuously unwelcome manner and then, apparently inspired by images of medieval torture inflicted upon women, finds a way to impale him that Hollywood's leading torture-porn experts will kick themselves over not having dreamed up first.

But the woman generously saves the most gruesome, preferably unwatched act for herself in the final chapter, the title of which, "The Three Beggars," provides no revelations worth waiting for.

Offering the opposite of hope for anyone aspiring to recover from grief through therapy, analytical or experiential, and perhaps distantly inspired by the marital battles in Strindberg, "Antichrist" does not even raise the possibility of healing through religion, leaving the title to seem rather arbitrary and more than a little pretentious. Moreover, the blood-smeared sensationalism smothers what serious thoughts the script serves up in passing, just as the sexual interludes detract from the film by playing peek-a-boo and making you try to figure out what's real and/or how it was faked.

Looking very good, Dafoe maintains his dignity most of the way with a performance of seriousness and tact, while Gainsbourg veers between sullenness and extreme histrionics. Only people to appear in the film aside from the lead actors are the little boy and some extras near the beginning and at the end.

Pic's strong physical values include ace lensing by Anthony Dod Mantle in two styles, the shimmering monochrome of the bookends and the more rugged, often hand-held work in the cabin and on the densely green mountain locations; although the film was shot in Germany, the nominal Seattle-area setting is suggested by internal evidence.

End credits dedication to the late Andrei Tarkovsky was greeted by laughs and catcalls in Cannes.

A mixed review from Peter Brunette in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

CANNES -- With his latest offering, "Antichrist," Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier is in no danger of jeopardizing his reign as the most controversial major director working today. Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made. As such, commercial prospects appear slim, though many of the auteur's most ardent fans will want to see the film anyway. And they should.

"Antichrist" is relentlessly and solely focused on a married couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. As we learn in a rather pretentious prologue shot in slow-motion and black and white, their toddler son has fallen to his death through an open window while they were making love. Bereft, they retreat to Eden, their ironically named cabin in the woods, to recuperate from their loss. At this point, von Trier switches to color and his signature chapter headings. The fact that the first three are "Pain," "Grief" and "Despair" does not bode well.

In discussing this self-styled "most important film of my career," von Trier has referred to the forbidding Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Clearly, or rather not so clearly, von Trier is working in a full-out symbolic vein here, as did Strindberg late in his career, but alas, the film medium inevitably carries with it, like an albatross, a heavy charge of realism. Hence, many of von Trier's more outrageous, ultra-serious symbolic moments (such as a talking fox, its guts half ripped out, muttering "chaos reigns" in an "Exorcist" voice) will -- and did, in the press screening -- undoubtedly provoke unintended laughter. Or horror, as when genitals are scissored off, masturbation produces blood rather than semen and holes are drilled into legs.

The film's most successful thematic confrontation is that between frail reason (embodied in the pathetic, infantilizing attempt by the husband, who's a psychotherapist, to treat his deeply disturbed wife with cognitive therapy) and the uncontrollable forces of emotion and mystery that emerge victorious.

Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog. ("Nature is Satan's church," the wife utters apocalyptically at one point.) This focus on nature subsequently gets conflated with human nature and finally with female nature, where von Trier's careerlong misogyny comes into fullest bloom. In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged.

The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images, abetted by an often superb sound design. From the opening titles, abstract expressionism reigns powerfully and conveys a great deal of intense, if finally unspecifiable, meaning. Unfortunately at some point a story has to be told, no matter how minimalist, and with actual human beings, no matter how symbolically freighted. This is where the film falls apart.

Mixed review from Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice, who has championed von Trier in the past: he praises Gainsbourgh

Lars von Trier's Antichrist Puts Us Through the Wringer
By J. Hoberman


Written and directed by Lars von Trier
IFC Films
Opens October 23
IFC Center
Lars von Trier's doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something—if only a terrible sensation of nothingness—that it's almost poignant.

Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their toddler because they were too sexually engrossed to notice him climbing out of the nursery window—literally experiencing what Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom," teetering on the ledge. Incorporating languid slow motion and brutal hardcore, set to a dreamy Handel aria ("Let me weep . . .") and an inexorable, cosmic wash-cycle, the fabulously inappropriate opening is so precious it might have been staged inside the snow globe from Citizen Kane. Laughter, tears, disgust, and fascination with von Trier's technique seem equally valid responses.

Unsympathetic as they are, the unnamed protagonists offer little emotional guidance: He's a smugly rational psychotherapist; she's a researcher with an interest in the occult, driven mad by guilt and her husband's attempts at treatment. The pair retreat to the woodland cabin they call Eden. (Snakes are not among the menagerie of wild things.) Rather than finding solace, He and She wind up destroying each other—just as von Trier, perhaps, imagines destroying himself. In interviews, including a Skypecast at the New York Film Festival, where the movie had its local premiere, the filmmaker discussed his own severe depression while making Antichrist as well as the movie's failure as auto-therapy.

"The idea was to make a horror film," von Trier told the press and, in its hubris, Antichrist does suggest The Shining's foredoomed attempt to be the ultimate scary movie. There are other parallels to Kubrick, but von Trier's spookhouse is mainly populated with the ghosts of his Nordic brethren: Dreyer's fascination with witchcraft soaked in Munchian angst and fused with Bergman's conjugal claustrophobia, not to mention Strindberg's taste for mutually assured domestic destruction. Actually, as a reader posted after I reviewed Antichrist at Cannes, the underlying text is Ibsen's Little Eyolf, which also concerns a child who falls victim to his parents' sex-distraction, with the ensuing collapse of their marriage.

Although a chronic over-reacher, von Trier has twice achieved greatness. His purest film, The Idiots (1997), is a seemingly straightforward provocation that anticipates Borat, Jackass, et al., by having actors regress, drooling and spazzing, often in public; Dogville (2005), an exemplar of 21st-century cinema in questioning the medium's narrative bias and photographic claims on truth, uses a variety of distancing theatrical devices to advance a compellingly ritualistic allegory of Christian charity and Old Testament wrath. Both movies are showy stunts that shrewdly address the assumptions of cinematic real-ness. Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience—the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.

The filmmaker strains his enterprise past the breaking point with grotesque torture and two types of castration, shown as money shots in mega close-up. By comparison, the images of self-devouring nature (a deer bolting off in the middle of giving birth, a crow pecking at its dead young) and intimations of supernatural bad vibes (sudden storms, tree-shaking winds) are merely atmospheric. With the exception of the talking fox whose show-stopping pronouncement, "Chaos reigns" (delivered after She imagines she's cured and He starts having "crazy dreams"), became the NYFF catchphrase, the hallucinations are clumsy and gratuitous.

Still, Antichrist is not without its qualities—notably von Trier's boundless sarcasm and skill with actors. Gainsbourg's courageous, uninhibited performance effectively creates the movie, while the funniest, most awful scenes all but parody the couple's agonized interactions. She wants to obliterate her consciousness with sex; He'd rather calm her anxiety by teaching her correct breathing or, at least, compelling her to name the object of her dread. ("Can't I just be afraid without a definite object?" She demands, the patient from hell.) A last-ditch attempt at role reversal—He tries to play nature with She cast as the voice of reason—triggers a wave of mutilation beyond anything imagined by the Pixies.

While it's an open question as to whether He or She is more delusional, Antichrist belongs to its stars—two wildly ascetic, dedicated types. Making love, Dafoe and Gainsbourg might be a pair of copulating skeletons. Spectacular in their angularity, these two bags of bones look like they could poke holes in each other—which is, in the end, exactly what they do.

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A grade C review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Owen Gleiberman

Lars von Trier, once a gravely exciting artist (Breaking the Waves), has reduced himself to the status of a quixotically perverse publicity freak. Antichrist, his latest fake outrage, is 
an art-house couples-therapy torture-porn horror film. It opens with a slow-motion black-and-white prologue, scored to a Handel aria, in which two parents (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) make graphic love in the shower as their toddler steps out a window and falls to his death. The scene is shot like a music video, which suggests its underlying message: Von Trier now sees tragedy as cool.

The husband, a professional therapist, tries to ease his wife's grief with too much smugly
 detached calm, and so it doesn't take us long to see where their healing is headed: to a war of patriarchal control and ''unreasonable'' feminine rage. For half an hour or so, the movie casts a Bergmanesque psychodramatic spell. But then the two go to a cabin in the woods, at which point Antichrist doesn't deepen so much as it unravels. Von Trier throws in many devices (symbolic falling acorns, half-butchered talking animals), but the one real dramatic trick he has up his sleeve is pain. As in torture. As in... mutilation as marital catharsis. The trouble 
 is, it's all too exhibitionistic to ring true. The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked. C