Antichrist (2009)
Directed by Lars von Trier
A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
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Von Trier's imagery recalls the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Sacrifice, especially with the cabin and woods that pulse with earthy tones of green and brown.
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?
The themes, cinematic devices and underlying darkness of this extraordinary work reflect the best films from the likes of David Lynch and David Cronenberg (whose films Crash, 1996, and Dead Ringers, 1988, share a blood-soaked vision of sexuality-by-way-of-pain with Antichrist).
The actors deliver a visceral and bughouse-intense variation on Ingmar Bergman marriage-is-hell psychodramas, even as von Trier evokes the haunted quality of Bergman’s medieval allegories (throwing in a shot of Dafoe’s head against a charcoal horizon that echoes Max Von Sydow in The Seventh Seal).
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Porn and horror film violence have always shadowed art cinema, and in films as varied as Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, Saló, Hiroshima mon amour, Persona, and Prénom Carmen, art cinema claims the power to depict the most extreme human behavior in a coherent, mediated way, incorporating but going beyond the capacity of marginal sensationalist genres.
This cinematic tradition can be traced back at least as far as 1929, when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí began their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou with a depiction of a man slicing a woman's eyeball open.
Her despair promptly ferments into a passionate hatred for her husband, who she subjects to prolonged torture after mutilating herself in a scene so shocking it makes the eye-slicing scene from Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (1929) look like a Hi-5 dance routine.
In a full color handout given to press and potential buyers at some Cannes screenings, opposite a few uniquely blank excerpts from a Danish Film Institute interview with the director thereâs a photo of Von Trier that seems to directly reference, down to the three-quarter profile with the smug facial expression, the famous publicity shot of Alfred Hitchcock turned to face a live crow perched on his shoulder that was distributed to promote the film of his that most directly drew lines between female sexuality and the unpredictable horrors of nature, The Birds.
The films of Lars von Trier, the brilliant, bellicose Danish director of The Idiots, Breaking the Waves and Dogville, aspires to the condition of exquisite, immersive poetry that is, to be felt, rather than questioned, analyzed, critiqued.
For me, most of this was absurdly abstract in a way that his best films – Breaking the Waves , Dancer in the Dark – are not.
He was involved in preproduction on Breaking the Waves and I was hired by a producer to redo a script von Trier owned about a bizarre historical figure, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a German-Russian aristocrat and Czarist officer who in 1921 lead anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, briefly conquered Mongolia, and dreamed of an Asian Buddhist army that under his command would conquer Europe.
Writer/director Lars von Trier's ("Breaking the Waves," "Dogville") film was the lightening rod of controversy at this year's Cannes film festival and looks to continue the debate with art film audiences.
In all his best known works -- from "Breaking the Waves" (1996) through "Dancer in the Dark" (2000), "Dogville" (2003) and "Manderlay" (2005) -- Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has repeated the the same template: He gives us an appealing female protagonist . . .
Fusing the carnal intensity of Breaking the Waves (I was with it) with the horror-movie schtick of his Danish TV series The Kingdom (I was with that, too), and piling on religious symbolism, cloaked misogyny (in the guise of feminist doctrine) and graphic scenes of genital mutilation and torture, Von Trier has delivered a movie designed to abrade and repel.
After therapist Willem Dafoe and academic Charlotte Gainsbourg lose their son in a coitus-related accident, they face their grief by retreating to a secluded cabin they call "Eden," at which point the movie explodes into a cross between Don't Look Now and The Evil Dead.
But most of all, the story of "Antichrist" resembles Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" (1973) -- one of the greatest horror movies ever made.
Antichrist will remind horror buffs right off the bat of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
It’s a far cry from Nicolas Roeg’s excellent 1973 chiller Don’t Look Now, which maintains a high-gloss art-house sheen yet draws us into its similar story of a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) coping with the drowning death of their child.
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(Dreyer’s Day of Wrath might well be Gainsbourg’s character’s favorite film of all time, as it concerns her thesis topic, the persecution of women as witches in 16th century Europe.)
It is a religious allegory (the “antichrist” of the title is nature itself), it is a horror film, it is a story of fairy tale simplicity and resonance, and it is a European art film in the Scandinavian mode of Ingmar Bergman, especially the Bergman of The Hour of the Wolf and The Silence; essentially it is a “two hander” in the manner of a Strindberg play.