Fantastic Fest Review: Antichrist

The influence of Lars von Trier's latest magnum opus Antichrist reaches far and wide. The overarching theme of the film, "chaos reigns," became the unofficial slogan of Fantastic Fest, and although recently cancelled to legal issues, CHUD.com and IFC sponsored a "make your own Antichrist poster" contest so that similarly disturbed individuals could artistically express their love for what has come to be, for me, one of the worst horror films of the year.

This sort of reaction is not what I would have expected from such a brilliant filmmaker. My experience with the film prior to viewing it was simply reading the words, "Lars von Trier to make a horror film called Antichrist," and that was all that was needed to get the anticipation flowing through my veins. What we have here, then, is another example of the hype machine working its magic, instilling in me expectations that can in no way be met or exceeded.

Antichrist features all of two people throughout its muddled storyline. A nameless couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are grieving over the loss of their child Nic, who fell out of the window while the two made love. Although He has begun to come to terms with the death of his child, She has trouble moving on, collapsing at his funeral and waking up in the hospital. From there He, a therapist, decides to take her care into his own hands. Eventually they end up at a cabin in a forest named Eden, which turns out to be the focal point of her fear and the location at which She, along with her son, spent time working on her thesis, which focused on the subject of gynocide. Once there strange things start to happen. Genital mutilation ensues.

The process through which von Trier traces the couple's inevitable downfall is laborious, with the only respite coming from the fury of Eden itself. The futility of his attempts at trying to fix his wife are paralleled by the forest's foreboding evil, which serve to exacerbate the everpresent sense of dread through ballistic acorns and twisted visions of animals. Unfortunately, these scenes, however beautifully absurd and poignant they may be, serve as nothing more than a brief respite from the story, which is openly misogynistic and seems to exist solely as a means through which von Trier can shock and awe.

This jolts come in the form of the graphic scenes of explicit sex and genital mutilation that have come to serve as the main bone of contention among critics. The scenes are needlessly graphic and laden with violence, with the climax of the film serving as perhaps the film's most brutal aspect. All of this unfolds as She reveals the effects of her research and the impact Eden had on her, driving her into despair and self-loathing. His attempts at alleviating her suffering, seemingly driven by grief, are fruitless in the presence of Eden, its very nature analagous to her suffering.

Despite my distaste for the film, it opens with one of the most beautful scenes set to film in recent memory, and ends with an equally as beautiful albeit near-nonsensical scene. The beginning is set to "Lascia ch'io pianga," an aria from Handel's opera Rinaldo, filmed entirely in black and white, and alternates between the couple in the throes of passion and their son crawling out of bed and falling out of the window. Words simply can't do it justice.

Antichrist was a film made for Lars von Trier and no one else. It is incredibly self-serving, a creation made to slather upon the masses a seemingly poignant piece of artwork that is nothing more than a garbled mess of misogyny and excessive sexual violence that serves no other purpose than to shock and offend. The most unfortunate aspect of the film, however, is the potential. It is hopelessly beautiful, and while there's an excellent film in there somewhere, it is unfortunately shrouded in a thick coat of pretentious nonsense.

I am clearly in the minority, especially among those I consider colleagues, but while I appreciate von Trier's attempt, I simply feel he failed at producing a competent thriller that focused on the true horror of loss, grief and, however you choose to interpret it, sin.