Antichrist

Director: Lars Von Trier
Screenwriter: Lars Von Trier
Starring: Willem Dafoe (interview), Charlotte Gainsbourg
Running time: 104 mins
Certificate: 18

It's hard to think of a more controversial modern director than Lars Von Trier, with no better illustration than his 1998 movie The Idiots. The film divided critics at Cannes, where some hailed it as genius and others were appalled by explicit scenes of quasi-pornography and a plot involving adults pretending to be disabled. The venerable Mark Kermode, of course, was thrown out of the screening for yelling '"Il est merde! Il est merde!" from the back of the theatre. The reputation of Antichrist precedes it, with the newspapers already up in arms over its graphically violent denouement. However, the impression of a film as one featuring nothing but wall-to-wall sex and genital mutilation isn't an entirely accurate one.

There is a plot, though it wouldn't be unfair to describe it as something of a skeleton. A couple's toddler escapes his crib while his unnamed mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and father (Willem Dafoe) have sex in another room. The child peers awkwardly at his parents in a clinch, before walking to another room, climbing on to a table and falling out of the open window to his death in the snow. Weeks after the funeral, the mother is dosed up on antidepressants and incapable of moving through the grieving process. Her partner, a psychiatrist, talks her into giving up the drugs before deciding on a trip to their cabin in a deserted woodland named Eden where, eventually, all hell is unleashed.

The prologue works as a microcosm of the whole movie. It's over-stylised, features a needless closeup of a thrusting erect penis and comes across as a facile student project, albeit one with two fantastic actors. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are the film's sole saving graces and their performances are as believable and perfectly measured as they are powerful. Throughout the movie, both leads succeed in preventing what's on screen from being completely unwatchable. The problem with Antichrist is not that it is bloody or attention-seeking, though it is clearly both. It is that from a thought-provoking premise it says absolutely nothing about grief, its two protagonists or the human condition. The film might be groping towards a study of the nature of evil, or the evil of nature, it's hard to be sure, and for all the visually arresting switches between Dogme-style shakeycam, faux operatic slow-motion and imagery-heavy cutaway dream sequences, it's a bit hard to care.

And despite the honest intensity of the two actors, when the graphic violence eventually comes, it's hard not to immediately recall Eli Roth's Hostel or the lamentable Saw series, with the gore simply localised between the knees and the navel. Renewed concerns about the supposed misogyny, misandry or misanthropy of Von Trier are missing the point. These are not questions that are going to be answered by watching Antichrist, whose message seems too ill thought out and presented to be understood, rather than too complex.

Dogville, Von Trier's cinematic masterpiece from 2003, was a film that said so much about so many things. It explored America, evil, men and women, humanity, power and more, while being ambiguous enough to treat its audience with respect and let them draw their own conclusions. Antichrist just seems horribly shallow in comparison. Von Trier has confessed that in working on the film through a bout of almost debilitating depression, Antichrist was made using "about half" of his "physical and intellectual capacity". The truth is that it shows.


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