Chaos Reigns

Antichrist
(Lars Von Trier, 2009)

3.5 Stars

Words do not come easily when it comes to infamous director Lars Von Trier’s latest offering, the award winning and highly controversial Antichrist. Indeed, having endured its full two hours of psychological and graphically violent meandering, I realise that I’ve watched something quite special, but am entirely unsure whether or not I actually enjoyed it.

Illustrating in four chapters a couple, known only as He and She as they cope with the death of their only child, Antichrist shows with nauseating detail how very wrong things can go when an already unstable woman, obsessed with the concept of evil in the female psyche, is taken off her meds and “looked after” by her well meaning psychiatrist husband.

Willem Dafoe (Platoon, Mississippi Burning) plays with touching naivety the well meaning husband who is inordinately sucked into his wife’s insanity. Charlotte Gainsbourg, star of many a French indie movie, is both disturbing and entrancing as She, pulling in both Dafoe and the audience to her utter desperation and ultimate madness.

The opening scene of Antichrist is perhaps one of the most powerful prologue sequences I have seen in some time, with the couple’s child falling to his death whilst his oblivious parents make love in the next room. The rather gratuitous addition of Dafoe’s todger somehow adds an even more disturbing element to proceedings. The ensuing film, though punctuated by a lot of psycho-babble that at times was incomprehensible, is both beautifully shot and compassionately acted.

As She succumbs further and further to her insanity, and the forces of nature appear to stack against them, the torture inflicted on her husband seems not only illogical, but also somehow utterly believable. In his two characters, Von Trier seems to have created a pair of sickeningly original portrayals of the human psyche; sexual, violent and inevitably self-destructive.

Antichrist is certainly not to everyone’s taste, and at times it is extremely difficult to watch (the wife’s self mutilation scene being one of the most horrific displays of cinematic violence I think I’ve ever seen). And yet upon contemplation, I feel that this really was a film worth watching, and one that has left me with something. Exactly what the “something” is, I’m not quite sure… I’ll let you know if I work it out…