Lars Von Trier’s reprehensible Antichrist opens with a four minute, black-and-white sequence—completely in slow motion—of He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) passionately fucking in the shower, juxtaposed with their unattended son jumping out the window to his death. The entire scene, set to swelling opera music, perfectly epitomizes the movie as a whole: excessive, pretentious, gratuitous (we get to see Dafoe’s penis in close up move in-and-out), and extraordinarily annoying to watch.Von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville…fine pictures, all) was suffering from depression when he conceived Antichrist, and has admitted that he wrote the script as a test to see if he was still capable of making films, and that the screenplay and shooting were done without much enthusiasm. The results are not encouraging, to say the least. Occasionally sumptuous imagery—some of it fleetingly Lynchian—is quickly drowned out by the venom and anger that cut’s through every shot.

Antichrist is a two-person show—aside from the son’s funeral, it’s basically Dafoe, Gainsbourg, and various forms of nature. Von Trier attempts a psychological deconstruction of various stages of post-tragedy reactions: grief, pain, and despair. He (yes, no names are given for either character; clearly, it’s supposed to be a universal analysis…the flaw in this thinking will be discussed later), a therapist, decides it would be a good idea to personally treat his wife, who’s understandably distraught by the loss of their son. Also understandably, her husband’s emotional detachment creates serious tension between the pair, and She is forced to look for another outlet for her misery. She quickly turns to sex and violence, and her masochistic and sadistic tendencies rapidly escalate, culminating in a final 20 minutes that’s nearly impossible to watch without cringing multiple times. The brutality is sickening, and unlike, say, the broken glass sequence in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers—where the entire film built up to one brief, painful moment—it serves no overarching purpose, quickly becoming an exercise in haughty directorial conceit.

Von Trier tends to portray his female leads as broken, flawed women, and Antichrist has been hammered in some circles as being extremely misogynistic. There’s certainly some truth to this, as the cavalier manner with which Von Trier develops She into an out-of-control, raging lunatic & nyphomaniac is troubling. His choice to eschew names for the leads—essentially stripping them of personal identity—indicates a feeling that, indeed, these would be universal psychological reactions to a child’s death; a dubious claim, to say the least. She’s descent into hysteria is mostly ridiculous, and as we’re given no background on who she is or what she stands for, we’re simply expected to buy it as an accurate portal into the tortured soul, and Von Trier doesn’t come close to putting forth a convincing argument.

There will be those who praise Antichrist as a fascinating examination of the psyche, and will argue that the extreme brutality is necessary to truly probe the depths of what tragedy can breed, but it’s all packaged in such an ugly vessel that it borders on unwatchable. To make matters worse, Von Trier shows a surprising lack of command over his material—e.g., we see a fox chewing itself into a bloody mess, only to have any dark connotations totally erased when the fox suddenly deeply croons, “chaos reigns!” It’s such a laughably bad moment that it completely takes the viewer out of the movie’s mood. There are also a few grotesque scenes of mutilation that are bound to inspire a chorus of “owww!” throughout the audience, if not send many people to the exits early. After sitting through this train wreck in full, I wish I’d joined them.

23/100