When I caught up with it at the Vancouver International Film Festival two weeks ago, the screening was punctuated with the single loudest shriek I've ever heard in the theatre - that would have been when Gainsbourg gets out the scissors for a spot of ad hoc auto-surgery.
Index of antichrist 2009 movie movie#
But this time the boot is on the other foot, and for once the charge seems to stick no matter that the first half of the movie suggests Dafoe's smug therapist is due for a comeuppance.Īpparently someone had a seizure when the movie showed at the New York Film Festival recently. This director has often been accused of misogyny for the punishments that befall his heroines - spuriously, in my opinion. Chaos reigns all right, and Gainsbourg's traumatized mom is transformed nonsensically into a raving psycho witch-bitch. It's safe to say von Trier knows this climax is over the top: "Chaos reigns!" announces a fox, in perfect English, just as the movie goes off the deep end. Hiking to a log cabin in the mountains to uncover the apex of his wife's fears (it could be anywhere, but let's imagine we're in the neighborhood of Burkittsville), the doctor's little experiment in exposure therapy ends in crushed genitals and, uh, worse. Mindful that he's up against "Hostel," "Saw" and the like, Herr von Trier ups the ante considerably. Of course, when those great Scandinavian dramatists wanted to shock us with the ferocity of the battle of the sexes and show a married couple going at it tooth and nail, their only weapons were words. Their bitter, sometimes sourly funny back-and-forth fleetingly echoes the railing, pugnacious and remorseful men and women we find again and again in Strindberg and Bergman. She's not sure he's ready to share that torment with her.
He's an implacable rationalist, urging her to confront her fears and venture into the darkest recesses of her psyche. (There may be a deliberate echo here of the famous sex scene in Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now," a far more keenly calibrated examination of grief succumbing to the supernatural.)ĭafoe and Gainsbourg are riveting as the ill-matched couple.
The prologue - the child's death - is a luxurious, slow-motion rhapsody of explicit sex, black-and-white photography and baroque music, commingling with the infant's almost ersatz tragedy and finding perfunctory counterpoint in banal close-ups of the family's washer-dryer. It's not often that an art-house director takes up the implements to make a horror film, and for a while, "Antichrist" compels with its anguished intensity and audacious stylistic choices, not least the severity that keeps the focus exclusively on this man and woman, neither of whom is named. The Danish provocateur twice won prestigious honors at the Cannes Film Festival (with "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark") and re-energized European art cinema in the 1990s with the Dogme movement's so-called "Vows of Chastity." The movie's peculiarity can be accounted for in three words: Lars von Trier. Halloween is nearly upon us, but "Antichrist" is a mighty strange kind of horror movie, a wrenching psychodrama for two-thirds of its running time before collapsing into a steaming heap of deranged sadism and supernatural symbolism in the outrageous third act.
Not a good idea for either of them, as it turns out. He will be her partner and her grief counselor, and he will see her through this, if only she will place her trust in him. She's hospitalized and sedated for days and weeks before her husband (Willem Dafoe), a therapist, insists she return home. The mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is consumed with grief and guilt. (CNN) - An infant falls to his death from a second-story window while his parents are making love.
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