Review: Antichrist

10.30.09 | George D. Allen | Staff NotesPrint this Post

Tags: movie reviews

In the 1999 film Holy Smoke, director/co-writer Jane Campion’s eccentric melodrama of sexual politics, a religiously confused Kate Winslet is whisked away to an isolated cabin in the Australian outback, where expert cult deprogrammer (and hopeless womanizer) Harvey Keitel attempts to penetrate her intellectual and spiritual defenses in order to wean her from a cult that has abused her psyche with promises of empowerment and nirvana. Instead, his own moral weaknesses compromise him, leading the two into bed, and later, to a heated war over gender roles that ends with…well, with Harvey Keitel wearing lipstick and a red dress. Whether or not Keitel was effectively “castrated” by Winslet’s character is a matter for some interpretation. And, you had to be willing to indulge Campion’s sense of theatricality to be invested at all in the interpretive exercise.

It’s easier, I’d argue, to read that film as a more traditional narrative--that is, if you can see past the “shocks” of Winslet’s nude cavorting and spontaneous urination, and the sight of Keitel weeping his Bad Lieutenant weep in a tight red dress--where both characters learn from each other and end up the richer and wiser for their carnal and cathartic combat.

Not so much, in writer/director Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

While you can certainly place von Trier’s script within formulaic, “literary” boundaries (it’s separated into a prologue, three parts, and an epilogue, after all—complete with title cards), von Trier ramps up both the allegory and the shock value to a degree only the most adventurous of viewers will stomach. The film offers an aggressively uncomfortable experience on many levels, and it really gives nothing so surprising away to say that doomed couple Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg do not emerge from their tortured journey as particularly more enlightened for their deep and painful troubles.

Dafoe is a therapist hoping to help wife Gainsbourg through the grief that has stricken her since their young son died—falling out of a high window while they were engaged in the bliss of lovemaking. Von Trier opens the film with this tragedy, played out with a disturbing richness of cinematic poetry.

Mixing this profound horror with vivid visual lyricism right out of the gate, Antichrist only amplifies this baroque collision of the beautiful and the nightmarish as Dafoe, urging his emotionally crippled wife to dispense with medication and give way to his variation of the talking cure, ushers them into the place she fears the most: Eden, the isolated cabin in the wilderness where she spent her last summer with the young boy while working on an ambitious thesis project about violence towards women.

Even as He and She (their names are never more specific) arrive at Eden, nature itself seems to twist, darken, and take hold of Gainsbourg’s already fragile mind. Each effort Dafoe makes to engage her--with rationality, with words, with therapeutic exercises—only serves to distance them more. She makes desperate attempts to bond with her husband through impulsive and rough sex—but is she looking for escape, redemption, or punishment?

Her baffling torments render him intellectually impotent, and, while Dafoe makes increasingly misguided and unsuccessful attempts to center her mind and move her through the stages of grief, they gradually evolve into what appears to be mutual disgust and despair. Wrangling over issues of good and evil brings Gainsbourg ever closer to true madness, and a small detail about their son’s death provides a final, explosive trigger for bouts of surreal and sexual violence.

Does the end of the film leave us to rot in the darkness, or open a way in which to struggle towards the light? Hard to say. Will moviegoers even want to ponder the film’s impenetrables, exposed as they will be to a severely restricted universe (with the film never “opening up” beyond these two characters) and asked to alternately engage with the film sometimes emotionally, sometimes intellectually, as von Trier delivers one alienating gesture after another, pushing—perhaps grinding would be a better word—such powerfully raw emotions and vile, horrific images out of the screen?

Not to mention suggesting all the while that such a wicked trial of the soul can be realized with a sense of beauty, however grim and harsh?

You can never fully “forget” yourself while watching Antichrist. You’re constantly pulled in and out of the film, forced to ask yourself about what you’re watching and what it “means.” This can be rewarding or tiresome, depending on your general disposition for von Trier’s filmmaking and empathy with the story and the performances.

And as far the acting goes, both Dafoe and Gainsbourg are truly mesmerizing. Their fiercely uninhibited work here is met with respect by their director, who does them the not-so-easily-managed service of making a film about such difficult material that is a far from trifling experience. Antichrist wallows in tough extremes but is never cheap about it. The film is a meditation on some of life’s most fearful miseries. It’s reminiscent of films like the aforementioned Holy Smoke, as well as Crash (the Cronenberg film), In the Realm of the Senses, and Woman in the Dunes—and it has more than a passing kinship with the dread-inducing imagery of David Lynch.

Audiences are ever complaining about the shallowness of modern movies. Will they reward a movie like Antichrist--which brings rare and challenging substance to the screen--with the attention it deserves? Or will they simply blanch at the talk of irreverence, gore, unerotic sex and controversy, and promptly line up for the next middlebrow blockbuster?

Probably the general answer to that question is easy, which is a shame. And, probably expected and just fine for the person who names their film Antichrist in the first place. Lars von Trier has remarked he made this film as a response to his own depressions. He had something to work through. So will you, if you allow this movie into your mind and let it share some space with the darkest places you fear to go.