Film review: Antichrist

Published on Thursday 23 July 2009 18:58

ANTICHRIST (18) ** DIRECTED BY: LARS VON TRIER STARRING: WILLEM DAFOE, CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG

GRIEF, despair, disembowelled animals, talking foxes, graphic genital mutilation – Lars von Trier serves up the lot in his tediously provocative new film Antichrist. A twisted foray into the horror genre as well as a spin on the Book of Genesis, it's a film that seems custom-designed to anger, appal and annoy thanks to its emotional brutality, its feminist-baiting musings on Original Sin and its horrific imagery. Yet it also seems like a glib joke on von Trier's part, as if he's daring us to engage with it on an intellectual level when really there's not much to engage with – at least, not much beyond wondering whether it's worth getting worked up about how upsetting the final 20 minutes are. Von Trier's reputation as a cinematic prankster certainly suggests he might be taking the piss and, despite claiming he made the Antichrist in a fit of depression, there are a couple of sly nods in the plot to reinforce this idea.

That plot revolves around an unnamed couple, credited simply as He and She, who in an effort to get over the death of their young son, unwisely retreat to a woodland cabin ominously named Eden. He (Willem Dafoe) is a therapist given to pretentious psychobabble. She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a psycho given to rampant sex and, much later, DIY torture. Together they are one of the most boring screen couples ever committed to celluloid. When we're first introduced to them it's in a slow-motion prologue sequence so ostentatiously filmed in high gloss black-and-white that it should immediately tip you off to the fact that von Trier is basically playing you for a fool. The scene in question features Dafoe and Gainsbourg engaging in some fairly athletic hardcore shower sex. Von Trier confronts us with a close up of an erect penis then proceeds to intercut scenes of love-making with some of their toddler slowly edging towards an open window from which he will promptly take a fatal tumble into the snow below.

The remainder of the film is divided into chapters, the titles of which – 'Grief', 'Pain', 'Despair', and so on – give a fairly good indication of what to expect, if not quite tipping you off to the crushing boredom that will accompany all the unpleasantness. Most of the tedium comes courtesy of the ruminations on the nature of evil von Trier has our grieving protagonists spout as they work through their misery. This generally takes the form of Dafoe's therapist constructing psychologically torturous games to help Gainsbourg get past the guilt she apparently feels over the death of her son. The reams of therapy-speak are punctuated by further graphic scenes of copulation, masturbation and shots of savagely mutilated animals. Arty homages to genre classics such as Don't Look Now, Evil Dead, Long Weekend and Saw come burdened with theological and philosophical references and imagery aplenty. The forest is referred to as Satan's church. Gainsbourg's character has an obsession with witches that may have driven her insane. Baby birds fall out of trees, their bodies covered in insects. A deer runs through the forest with a stillborn fawn hanging from its rear. A fox eats its own entrails… you could spend hours unravelling it all and, because it has been so beautifully and hauntingly filmed by Anthony Dodd Mantle (the best digital video cinematographer in the business), you might be tempted to do just that. But there remains the suspicion that this would be playing into von Trier's hands. He may coax deeply committed performances from Dafoe and Gainsbourg, but he has also very deliberately designed the film to keep you in a state of high anxiety by encouraging us to spend everyone of its first 90 minutes anticipating what he has in store for the finale.

Like a modern PT Barnum he lures us in with the promise of a freak show and you sit there, fully aware of the all the advanced hype – its status as "the most shocking film in the history of the Cannes film festival", the way its publicity campaign has been excitedly pimping the fact that UK audience will see it "completely uncut" – just waiting for von Trier to do his worst. And all credit to him, he does just that. When these scenes come, they're so unbearably graphic they could almost be considered an artful parody of torture porn were they not so hard to take. In this final, frenzied, leg-crossing, kamikaze assault on the senses we're treated to such delights as blood-filled ejaculate, a leg being bolted to a piece of stone and – please, make it stop – a scissor-slicing clitoridectomy. Indeed, at the risk of further fuelling the hype and rising to the bait, it will leave you with images in your head you'd probably rather not have.