DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Charlotte Gainsbourg takes a reflective breather between bouts of bloody mayhem in Von Trier’s Antichrist.Lars Von Trier must really hate his therapist. That’s the only definite message I can glean for sure from Antichrist, based on what he puts the movie’s resident psychologist, played by Willem Dafoe, through. The doctor and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, have recently lost a child, a toddler who accidentally falls out a window at the start of the movie while the pair are mid-coitus, during the gloriously shot and scored black and white segment that opens the film. Gainsbourg’s character is bereaved to the point of complete physical collapse, and her husband decides, against his own better judgment, to take on her treatment himself. The pair retire to “Eden,” their secluded cabin in the woods, where the healing process goes about as poorly as it possibly could, but about as you’d expect from an October release that takes place in a creepy forest. That’s about the only way in which it meets horror-movie preconceptions, though.
Von Trier famously made this movie following his own nervous breakdown. Frankly, it shows. It feels as much like the filmed equivalent of primal scream therapy as it does like the “horror” movie it pretends to be, pained outbursts of a mind desperately attempting to cast the demons out. The director goes beyond his reputation as provocateur here. If you’ve read accounts of the film’s disastrous Cannes premiere, everything you heard is true. Graphic sex acts. Graphically depicted genital mutilation. Both at the same time. It’s all there, shot with operatic grace by Von Trier and Oscar-winning cinematographer (for Slumdog Millionaire) Anthony Dod Mantle. It’s twice as stomach turning as anything the sick minds over at the Saw series can dream up with, and perhaps even more shocking than Takashi Miike classics like Audition or Ichi the Killer. Woe to the poor moviegoer who shows up at E Street this weekend and says, “Hey, look, there’s a new Willem Dafoe film, let’s see that!” without any warning of what’s in store.
So, OK, fine, it’s shocking, it’s in your face, it’s bloody. Is it any good? I’m still not sure. There are times when it’s certainly bad, such as the now-signature moment when a demonic fox growls “Chaos reigns” at the good doctor. (It’s so laughable that the first YouTube parodies have come out before the film has even been released.) But Von Trier’s pervasive use of symbolism renders the whole thing nearly impenetrable, and extremely difficult to evaluate. There seems to be plenty he’s trying to say, but he appears to have little interest in anyone actually understanding it. That’s certainly his prerogative, and I’ve rarely criticized other directors (David Lynch springs to mind) for similar inscrutability. Still, I can’t necessarily say I enjoyed Antichrist, and neither could any of the other five people I watched it with. But at the same time, it’s a movie that made a strong impression on all of us, that we were all glad we’d watched, and which prompted nearly an hour of discussion afterward. On that basis alone, I have to say that there’s something to this nightmare, but I still can’t say for sure what it is. And I’m not sure I’m strong willed enough to subject myself to it a second time to find out.
