Antichrist

The first words that appear on screen? ​‘Lars von Tri­er’. The next? ​‘Antichrist’. The biggest mis­take you can make with Denmark’s bad-boy auteur is tak­ing him too seri­ous­ly. Because he’s jok­ing. Even when he’s dead­ly seri­ous. Is Antichrist a joke? No. And yes. Label it auda­cious on-screen cathar­sis; the worst-date movie ever; and von Tri­er at his most vul­ner­a­ble. Writ­ten when the 53-year-old was bedrid­den by depres­sion, Antichrist can only real­ly be called shock therapy.

His ​‘hor­ror’ film (although it bare­ly fits that genre) begins in cap­ti­vat­ing beau­ty. Lensed in slo-mo by DoP Antho­ny Dod Man­tle in gleam­ing black-and-white to Handel’s ​‘Las­cia Ch’io Pianga’ (trans­la­tion: ​‘Leave me to weep over my cru­el fate’), Antichrist’s pro­logue sees a cou­ple hav­ing pas­sion­ate sex as the snow tum­bles out­side. In anoth­er room, their two-year-old son falls to his death from an open win­dow, land­ing in the street below like a bro­ken snow angel.

Already, von Tri­er is mess­ing with us. The stun­ning imagery runs way too close to art-school pre­ten­sion for it to be any­thing oth­er than delib­er­ate. We flash to colour and real-time: the woman (Char­lotte Gains­bourg) crum­pled with grief; her ther­a­pist hus­band (Willem Dafoe) tak­ing her to an iso­lat­ed cab­in in a for­est called Eden. Giv­en that von Tri­er breaks up his movie with chap­ter head­ings like ​‘Pain’, ​‘Grief’ and ​‘Despair’, you get the feel­ing that recu­per­a­tion isn’t exact­ly on the cards.

Sure enough, after a mea­sured, mas­ter­ful­ly paced first 45 min­utes, Gains­bourg rapid­ly goes men­tal – along with the movie itself. Glimpsed briefly in stat­uette form in the pro­logue, a deer, a crow and a fox all pro­vide gris­ly por­tends of what’s to come. ​“Chaos reigns,” growls the Fox. Yes, it’s a talk­ing fox. Go figure.

Scenes of beau­ty con­tin­ue to sur­face – from Dafoe’s incred­i­ble-look­ing face in close-up, to Gains­bourg will­ing her­self to blend into the grass – before von Tri­er final­ly spins over the top and down the oth­er side. Psy­cho-hor­ror goes body-hor­ror goes tor­ture-porn. How bad does it get? The blud­geon­ing of an erect penis. A hand-job fol­lowed by blood-spunk­ing. Female gen­i­tals scis­sored in graph­ic close-up. A man’s leg impaled then filled with a wheel.

“Nature is Satan’s church,” spits the woman. But what­ev­er von Tri­er has to say about nature, sex, women, reli­gion or any­thing else gets lost in his vio­lent­ly provoca­tive images. We get no answers from the odd­ball coda. By now, Antichrist has revealed itself as anti-every­thing: anti-com­mer­cial, anti-crit­i­cal, anti-hor­ror, anti-art-house.

But it’s hard to think of anoth­er film­mak­er who’s fever­ish­ly attempt­ed to express his own psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­mas with such out­ra­geous aban­don. Chaos reigns, indeed, as the mys­te­ri­ous vio­lence of human nature destroys Dafoe’s naïve attempts to calm­ly rea­son through his wife’s dis­tress with psychobabble.

The 53-year-old Dan­ish auteur calls it ​“the most impor­tant film of my career.” Pow­er­ful, dar­ing and frac­tured, if Antichrist is the most seri­ous dead­pan joke ever told, it’s a self-dep­re­cat­ing one as much as any­thing. It’s thrilling to see that von Trier’s vicious sense of mis­chief, his moviemak­ing skill and his desire to smash lim­its and expec­ta­tions all remain undimmed.

How­ev­er you swal­low it, this bizarre, hys­ter­i­cal melo­dra­ma is impos­si­ble to ignore. And the vision of von Tri­er sit­ting in bed writ­ing it is impos­si­ble to resist.