Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Horror/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Good holy grief. Out of nowhere, or from deep down south of Lars von Trier’s self-confessed depression rather, Antichrist lashes itself out of Danish soil, detonated at Cannes this year and blasted off all over both sides of the Atlantic with headline-grabbing precision. It had audiences walking out of cinemas, critics vilifying at the top of lungs (or rather tip of their pens) and had the Cannes’ panel branding it “the most shocking film in the film festival’s history”. It wouldn’t be surprising if it would make the Pope go apeshit.


Anyone unacquainted of the cinema of von Trier will be in for a visual and psychological confrontation. Pundits calling this one “torture porn” seem to have been missing the entire point of the auteur’s oeuvre. His films are essentially torture porn, in a way that they depict intense human sufferings, creatures being tormented in a godforsaken Earth – from the dissolution of an innocent believer in Breaking the Waves, the infernal struggle of a near-sightless woman in Dancer in the Dark to a small-town’s torture on a guest in Dogville – these are movies that confront audiences with bleak subject matters no matter how devastating they are. Only that Antichrist is the pinnacle of von Trier’s extreme depiction of human agony. One can easily dismiss that von Trier has picked up the Eli Roth material and wrap it up with the aesthetic of Tarkovsky, and we have an artistic package. That the controversial scenes of self-mutilation, hardcore sex, upfront penetration, penile shots ejaculating with blood and worst of all, a do-it-yourself clitoridectomy push the boundaries to what cinema can expose onscreen. They might seem unnecessary to some, but at the subtext of Antichrist, which is actually a brooding, complex meditation on grief, self-destruction and culpability, these depictions, disturbing as they may be, are only appropriate.


For a tale of a couple’s anguish over the loss of their child, it portrays such an intense psychological exploration on both the husband and wife’s psyches. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who both give fearless performances, are He and She who flee to their cabin in the woods called Eden to recuperate after losing their child on an accident whilst they were having sex (this is rendered through beautiful monochrome, using ultra-slow-motion, accompanied by an aria). Losing an offspring is a parent’s horror story – and von Trier self-consciously nods to Nicholas Roeg’s seminal Don’t Look Now. Whilst in the woods, the episode is interspersed with dream sequences, as though we are meandering through the minds, fears and subconscious of the protagonists, and as He tries to break down her defences, strips away her guards, belittles her to a childlike state, He psychologically pins her down to the ground. Being unable to fight back psychologically, She locks herself into a physical ordeal She’s capable of inflicting. Cue one celluloid history’s most orgiastic, unrestrained presentation of violence. Not even the 20-minute rape scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible can match Antichrist’s stomach-churning scene with a drill and a scissor.


Von Trier’s detractors would point out a very excessive representation of sex here. If one has to look closer, Antichrist is ridden, almost burdened with Christian symbols that it would leave audience connecting mental dots (The Three Beggars = The Three Kings, and Eden is the Biblical garden, geddit?), and it seems to reverse the Christian ideology. Antichrist provides an alternative world, one which is created by Satan, not God, and that man is inherently evil, not good. Von Trier suggests here whilst sex is the Original Sin, the forbidden fruit, it is also man’s most basic need. Sexuality is deeply ingrained in this picture. And since the couple has betrothed in the sinful act pre-empting them from saving their child from falling out of the window, She bears an irrepressible guilt, blaming her coitus, her basic function as a woman, hence her self-mutilation later. After watching this, you’ll definitely need a good splash of cold water on your face.


VERDICT:

An altogether harrowing, frustrating and gut-churning experience – it’s a kind of cinema that would have audiences bolting out of movie theatres for its uninhibited depiction of carnal violence. It’s easy to dismiss Antichrist’s aestheticsm of what is essentially torture porn, but one cannot deny Von Trier’s uncanny ability to portray disturbing human situations with a terrible beauty. For this is really like glimpsing into the dark abyss of humanity, once seen, never forgotten.



RATING: B+