Antichrist

Review

Props to Lars von Trier for managing to revive an idea that Judeo-Christian teaching, the Enlightenment, and feminism have helped us to suppress: that misogyny is a sound religious position. In his latest cinematic mugging, cheekily titled Antichrist, the baleful Dane confines a man, He (Willem Dafoe), and a woman, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), to a cabin deep in the woods (it’s called �Eden�). There, He attempts to heal She’s psychic wounds with that most paternalistic of tools: psychotherapy. Don’t run away from your pain, he says gently. Let it out. This goes on for some time (the film is divided into four �chapters�), with He laying Freudian hands on She, She mocking Freud, and Von Trier serving up horror-movie visions like the talking fox that announces, �Chaos reigns.� Since the film begins with the couple having (hard-core) sex while their toddler toddles out the window (in lyrical slow-motion, his stuffed animal bouncing and coming to rest beside his dead body), it’s tough to care about either of these self-centered people, the psychobabbling prat or the bad, slutty mother. It’s only in the last chapter�when She plunges a butcher knife into his crotch and He realizes what his therapeutic plumbing has loosed upon the world�that the movie’s true monster (and faith) is revealed.

Von Trier has said he made Antichrist after a depression, and for all its artiness, it’s revealing: It should clear up any doubts about his attitude toward the fair sex. It’s true that in most of his movies women are punished unjustly, even martyred, but it’s hard to shake off the feeling that he digs putting his female characters (and the actresses who play them) through the wringer. They might believe they’re innocent. They might not mean to be demonic. It’s just their nature�or, more precisely, their connection to what Camille Paglia calls �chthonian Nature� in all its wild, primal force. (Paglia celebrates the chthonian goddess; Von Trier gravitates toward burning her.)

Should you see Antichrist? It’s good for a few bad laughs, but you have to be up for a castration, a clitoridectomy, and a lot of symbolism. You have to be up for watching Dafoe and Gainsbourg�the latest in a line of masochistic stars to submit to this high priest of cinema and film-festival darling�humiliate themselves. Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives. David Cronenberg explored a similar theme in The Brood, in which a male psychiatrist’s est-like exhortation to a woman to �go all the way through� her trauma produces not inner peace but deformed psychotic babies that hammer people she doesn’t like to death. Now, that’s entertainment!

There is one poignant aspect of Antichrist. He pleads with She not to blame herself for the death of their son, but it turns out that it was her fault, that mothers can be creatures of chill, narcissistic indifference. When Von Trier appeared via a teleconferencing link at a New York Film Festival press screening (he’s also travel-phobic), a questioner expressed skepticism that any mother could be so cold. �You didn’t know my mother,� the director replied. I liked him at that moment. He looked quasi-human. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (11/2/09)