Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 25, 2009, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Antichrist, the latest cinematic provocation by Danish director Lars von Trier (showing at the current Fantastic Fest and then at the New York Film Festival, ahead of its limited release beginning October 23 from IFC), is one of those films that defies a simple positive or negative response. For this reviewer, anyway; a number of critics who previously caught the movie at Cannes and other showcases have had no problems expressing their opinions. Some booed and others raved, while one British critic caused a minor on-line scandal by affirming that he would never see the film yet penning a lengthy pan anyway, just based on what he’d read about it. And on the surface, Antichrist does sound like the kind of film that gratuitously goes too far in its sex and violence, combining the two in scenes of genital mutilation of both sexes. But is there a justifying artistry underneath it all?
I’m still trying to answer that question for myself, weeks after having seen it. What I do know is that I couldn’t take my eyes off a lot of the movie, even as there were moments that made even me, a longtime genre viewer, look away, wondering if the explicit sights were truly necessary.
What can’t be denied is the intensity and commitment that stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg bring to their characters, known only as He and She. In the opening sequence, this married couple is seen making love, an act that is both elevated into Art (black-and-white cinematography, Handel on the soundtrack) and reduced to its basest elements (hardcore penetration shots). Distracted by their passion, they fail to notice their toddler son as he climbs up to and out an open window, falling to his death. Some time later, as She has still not recovered from her grief, He (a therapist) takes her to a cabin pointedly called Eden in the midst of a dense forest to help her get past the tragedy. Instead, the woods and its animal inhabitants turn threatening and She descends into guilt-fueled madness, punishing her husband and herself in graphic, torturous ways.
There’s been a minor trend in independent and foreign horror circles lately toward “pushing the envelope” by staging the nastiest, most sadistic and clinical violence possible, often unencumbered by any attempt (or, apparently, any perceived need) to give it a dramatic context, purpose or point. In Antichrist, von Trier is clearly aiming for more than this kind of lazy shock value, tying in the personal atrocities to themes of despair and penance, with a heavy undercurrent of theological allegory. All this doesn’t make the grotesqueries any easier to watch, but it does work to subliminally justify their presence, as the most extreme expressions of the worldview von Trier seeks to convey.
Or does it? As much as I admired the filmmaking—with its precise framing and lush digital cinematography by 28 Days Later’s Anthony Dod Mantle—I caught myself thinking more than once: If von Trier has such command of the cinematic form to express his ideas, with a couple of fine actors at his disposal, does he really need to plumb such depths of unpleasantness to make his point? Or is he just throwing that stuff in there for the same reason the gorenographers do—to gratuitously rile people up and grab some attention?
And, given the forum in which this review is being written, what about simply judging Antichrist as a horror movie? It certainly horrifies, that’s for sure, but it aspires to much more, in a manner that those seeking a simple shock show may find pretentious. Others might discern a streak of misogyny running through the film, and I can’t say I’m not one of them (I’ve always felt von Trier’s acclaimed Breaking the Waves was more about simple masochism than spiritual martyrdom). Antichrist alternately intrigued and repulsed me, and the two reactions had battled each other to a draw by the time the movie was over. So I can’t say I loved it, can’t say I hated it, and I can’t offer a blanket recommendation or condemnation. All I know is that I’m very much looking forward to the comments that will follow once more Fangorians have gotten to see the movie.
