As a break from the standard horror fare, we've included Lars Von Trier's Antichrist in our series, 31 Days of Hell.
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| "We've got plenty of wood." |
The first entry in what would become known as
writer-director Lars Von Trier’s Depression
Trilogy, Antichrist is a nuclear
bomb of shocking taboo imagery and transcendent transgression with uncharted
depths of pain and despair. One of the
few films to legitimately shake the film world to its very foundations,
eliciting incredible amounts of anger and upset over explicit sex and extreme
violence, Antichrist is the work of
an artist at the peak of his creative powers.
Not to mention the fact that it genuinely terrifies and disturbs on multiple
levels while confidently skirting the line between art and exploitation until
the two extremes become indivisible.
Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won the Best Actress Award at the
Cannes Film Festival) and Willem Dafoe as a nameless couple, Antichrist explodes onscreen with
pornographic sexuality between the two as their infant son crawls from his crib
and falls from their apartment window to his death during their lovemaking. Mutually grief stricken and in a state of
shock, Dafoe’s psychotherapist (only known in the credits as he) persuades Gainsbourg (she) to come off her medication and
face her anguish directly. In the
process, the two leave the comforts of the city to venture deep into the woods
towards their getaway log cabin (aptly named Eden) to begin coping and
healing. As Gainsbourg sinks deeper into
anxiety and depression, the environment surrounding their home grows steadily
more oppressive with wounded animals appearing (including a talking demonic
fox), acorns pelting their rooftop nightly, dead forests and swollen
ticks. As Dafoe pokes and prods
Gainsbourg further, he uncovers a dark secret she’s been holding from him, at
which point Antichrist proceeds to
rape our eyes.
In the time honored tradition of writer-director
Lars Von Trier, the film is an aesthetic provocation in every capacity and
beyond. Divided into several chapters
(also a regular leitmotif of Trier), Antichrist
is a slow buildup to corrosive, indigestible sights and scenarios. There’s an overwhelming vibe of death around
every corner of Trier’s magnum opus, all the while lensed with a lush visual
beauty not seen since his downbeat 1996 spiritual epic Breaking the Waves. From an
aural standpoint, Antichrist is as
close to David Lynch’s sonic ambience as any other major director has come,
with heavy winds and implacable high pitched ringing in the ears. Danish colleague Nicolas Winding Refn’s
father Anders Refn again provides his Dogme editing technique, cutting between
fast zooms, whip pans and the shaky camera effect to evoke anxiety. The film’s explicit prologue and surreal
coda are lensed in glistening black-and-white with symmetrical precision, in
contrast to the lush yet desaturated images linking the bookends together. It goes without saying both Dafoe and
Gainsbourg lay their very lives on the line for Antichrist, portraying this damaged (and possibly demonic) couple
with fire and passion.
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| "Oh no!!!! Not the Evil Dead again. Sheesh!" |
The perverse, bizarre exercise in torment moves
silent and slow, preparing for an explosive climax which, to this day, still
divides, horrifies and enrages all who witness it in equal measure. To say you cannot believe the evidence of
your own eyes is an understatement as Trier’s duo move from the psychological
violence they inflict on each other towards unspeakable acts of physical
violence and torture. Inarguably, it
depicts sex and genitalia in ways we would never think or wish to imagine. This is the sort of artistic horror film
whose director intends to see every extreme through to its logical end, however
aberrant or unacceptable they may seem. Although
Trier’s admittedly vague about his own notions for the film as well as how it
all resolves, the controversy brewed by his tightest, most alert work to date,
more than makes up for the film’s shortcomings.
There’s an artistic height being reached by the writer-director’s
inverse Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve intend to destroy one another in
indescribably nasty ways. Most of all, Antichrist is an experience, taking
viewers on a journey deep into the dark side as well as honoring his own
mentors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman (whose images can be felt
in particular scenes such as an outdoor cremation). Whatever you make of Trier’s acerbic
creation, you will not walk away from Antichrist
unscathed, forever changed by the complete and unadulterated Hellscape its
impish writer-director has so lovingly crafted.
-Andrew Kotwicki