After his wife is crippled with grief following the death of their son, a therapist takes her on as his patient and retreats to a remote cabin in the woods, but his treatment soon becomes overshadowed by a mounting fear and insanity in both of them. Stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Directed by Lars von Trier and released in 2009.
Antichrist is at first a two-man performance piece and a portrait of staggering grief, and Charlotte Gainsbourg in particular brings her talent to bear in a very complicated and demanding role. The film is beautifully shot and is peppered with surrealistic imagery that tends to start in wonder and slowly mutate into quiet horror. It's also shockingly graphic, with very explicit scenes of both sex and sexual violence making it easy to see why it was so upsetting to so many people. Though I applaud the efforts, though, I think that Antichrist is ultimately a failure; a failure by a master director, which lends it something worth seeing, but a failure. The film is a portrait of shared madness between lovers, which I think is a really meaty idea, and the film borrows thematically from Hour of the Wolf, Ingmar Bergman's movie on the same subject. But Antichrist becomes lost within itself, and suffers from being heavy-handed in its somewhat confused tone of feminism, which points the finger (or seems to) at women as its modern perpetrators. This isn't an argument without any merit, but it's difficult particularly for a man to make it without being labelled a misogynist (and this wouldn't be the first time he has been), and Antichrist tries to be too many things at once to pay due attention to any one of them. Thematically, it's clear that Lars von Trier has a lot to say about humanity, humanity's relationship with nature, humanity's relationship with itself, but while his insights may be worthwhile, the supernatural sheen he lends the film ultimately overshadows any message he conveys.
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