Antichrist

Dir: Lars von Trier

2009

*****

It was Lars von Trier who once said that a film should be like a stone in your shoe. I like that idea a lot. His films have become a little more provocative than even he intended I believe and, like every genius, he has come under scrutiny. Antichrist is a provocative title for sure and it was intended as a horror film but I think the mainstream audience didn’t quite get it. Von Trier began writing Antichrist in 2006 while being hospitalised for depression. It is the first of his ‘Depression Trilogy’, which was followed by Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. So no surprise, it is about depression and everything that is associated with it. Many laughed it off but in my opinion it has everything a good horror should have visits some deeply disturbing subjects – far more disturbing than a man in a mask chasing horny teenagers with a knife anyway. It was conceived as a horror film as Trier felt it allowed for "a lot of very, very strange images.” He had recently seen several contemporary Japanese horror films such as Ring and Dark Water, from which he drew visual inspiration. Another basic idea came from a documentary von Trier saw about the original forests of Europe. In the documentary the forests were portrayed as a place of great pain and suffering as the different species tried to kill and eat each other. Von Trier was fascinated by the contrast between this and the view of nature as a romantic and peaceful place. Von Trier said: "At the same time that we hang it on our walls over the fireplace or whatever, it represents pure Hell.” In retrospect he said that he had become unsure whether Antichrist really could be classified as a horror film, because "it's not so horrific ... we didn't try so hard to do shocks, and that is maybe why it is not a horror film. I took the horror genre more as an inspiration, and then this strange story came out of it." I personally thought it was terrifying – castration, the loss of a child, talking animals…sounds like hell to me.The title was the first thing that was written for the film because the general idea is that earth was created by Satan and not by God, a very interesting concept with strong argument behind it. The film nearly didn’t happen due to the depression Trier was suffering and his first script was left unfinished for around a year. The post-depression version of the script was to some extent written as an exercise for von Trier, to see if he had recovered enough to be able to work again. Von Trier himself is a Catholic convert and wanted to add plenty of Christian symbolism and theology into the film and interestingly, the credits include a dedication to researchers of misogyny, anxiety, horror films and theology who worked on the film’s development. A couple, known only as ‘he’ and ‘she’ (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg)  make passionate love in their Seattle apartment while their toddler, Nic, climbs up to the bedroom window and falls to his death. The mother collapses at the funeral, and spends the next month in the hospital crippled with grief. The father, a therapist, is skeptical of the psychiatric care she is receiving and takes it upon himself to treat her personally with psychotherapy. She reveals that her second greatest fear is nature, prompting him to try exposure therapy. They hike to their isolated cabin in a woods called Eden, where she spent time with Nic the previous summer while writing a thesis on gynocide. During the hike, he encounters a doe which shows no fear of him, and has a stillborn fawn hanging halfway out of her. During sessions of psychotherapy, she becomes increasingly grief stricken and manic, often demanding forceful sex. The area becomes increasingly sinister to the man, including acorns rapidly pelting the metal roof, awakening with a hand covered in swollen ticks, and finding a self-disemboweling fox that tells him "chaos reigns." In the dark attic the man finds the woman's thesis studies, which includes violent portraits of witch-hunts, and a scrapbook in which her writing becomes increasingly frantic and illegible. She reveals that while writing her thesis, she came to believe that all women are inherently evil. The man is repulsed by this and reproaches her for imbibing the gynocidal beliefs she had originally set out to criticize. In a frenzied moment, they have violent intercourse at the base of an ominous dead tree, where bodies are intertwined within the exposed roots. He suspects that Satan is her greatest hidden fear. Upon viewing Nic's autopsy and photos she took of him while the two stayed at Eden, the man becomes aware that she had been systematically putting Nic's shoes on the wrong feet, resulting in a foot deformity. While in the woodshed, she attacks him, accuses him of planning to leave her, mounts him, and then smashes a large block of wood onto his groin, causing him to lose consciousness. The woman then masturbates the unconscious man, culminating in an ejaculation of blood. She drills a hole through his leg, bolting a heavy grindstone through the wound, and then tosses the wrench she used under the cabin. He awakens alone; unable to loosen the bolt, he hides by dragging himself into a deep foxhole at the base of the dead tree. Following the sound of a crow he has found buried alive in the hole, she locates him and attacks and mostly buries him with a shovel. Night falls; now remorseful, she digs him up but cannot remember where the wrench is. She helps him back to the cabin, where she tells him she does "not yet" want to kill him, adding that "when the three beggars arrive someone must die." In a flashback, she recounts Nic climbing up to the window, but she does not act, thus displaying her perceived essential evil. In the cabin she cuts off her clitoris with scissors. The two are then visited by the crow, the deer, and the fox. A hailstorm begins; earlier it had been revealed that women accused of witchcraft had been known to have the power to summon hailstorms. When he finds the wrench under the cabin's floorboards, she attacks him with scissors, but he manages to unbolt the grindstone. Finally free, he attacks her and strangles her to death. He then burns her on a funeral pyre. He limps from the cabin, eating wild berries, as the three diaphanous beggars look on. Reaching the top of a hill, under a brilliant light he sees hundreds of women in antiquated clothes coming towards him, their faces blurred. It has been suggested that Antichrist is a reworking of Abrahamic mythology framed as a question. The woman's statement made to her husband that nature is "Satan's church" suggests a triadic nexus of nature, demonic force and the death of the child - the nexus being made of three separate, psychic events: the inscrutable and threatening surroundings of the forest; her readings in the history of religious misogyny; and an accident when she loses the child in the woods a year before his death. It is also clearly a story of parental loss and the mourning and despair that follows. While the film interweaves multiple themes it is fundamentally a very personal and revealing film interwoven with idioms and images that document von Trier's struggle with a serious psychiatric disorder, and highly informed by his experience of cognitive behaviour and exposure therapy, shamanism and Jungian psychoanalysis. Von Trier himself commented on the experience of making the film as being a "fun" way of working through his own depression. I don’t think the film can be reduced to any one message. Indeed, Antichrist (along with Melancholia and Nymphomaniac) has a central female protagonist whose melancholic responses to this central trauma open up a space of subjective but also aesthetic-expressive engagement. In Antichrist, it is evident in the woman's intense anxiety and depressive withdrawal expressed through the neo-romantic landscape and super-naturalist elements of the forest to which she and her partner have retreated. It is a beautiful and horrific masterpiece. The film is dedicated to the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and his influence on Trier is very clear. Antichrist received a special ‘anti-award’ from the ecumenical jury at Cannes. The jury, which typically awards a film that promotes spiritual and humanist values, decided to award this film an anti-award for its ‘misogynistic’ views. Lars von Trier denied he was a misogynist, arguing he loved women and understood the character ‘Her’ better than ‘Him’. Fuck Cannes for that. It has become a tired argument that Trier hates women – in fact, he empowers women, making them the strong lead in nearly every film he makes. His films are hard to watch at times but they are a celebration of women and show just how strong they are. The controversial film director John Waters described the film as "If Ingmar Bergman had committed suicide, gone to hell, and come back to earth to direct an exploitation/art film for drive-ins, Antichrist is the movie he would have made." For me it is the ultimate horror film and so much more.