Anti-Christ (2009)

Review:


First, let me note that I’ve been watching a lot of movies with genital mutilation in them lately. I don’t know exactly what this says about me and my film selections, but suffice it to note they’ve mostly been good movies. There’s been “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” “Cries and Whispers,” “Teeth,” and now “Anti-Christ” and I must say, at least in the realm of graphic genital mutilation, “Anti-Christ” takes the cake.

Lars Von Trier has always been a filmmaker with extreme propensities. “Dogville” (2004) for instance was an excruciating experiment in minimalism, boredom, violence, and Americana. I personally found invigorating. Not many directors would dare what Von Trier dares. “Anti-Christ” follows suit.

Divided into a prologue, four chapters and an epilogue “Anti-Christ” tells the story of a couple demented by grief. Willem Dafoe plays a man referred to as he and Charlotte Gainsbourg plays she. In the prologue he and she are enraptured in explicit love making while their young child climbs out of its crib and falls to its death from a window. The couple is tormented by the death of their child. She is hospitalized with a debilitating depression. He, in turn, tries to ease his grief by focusing on the rehabilitation of his wife. He employs a cruel psychological treatment with she, a sadistic type of exposure therapy whereby he uncovers the source of his wife’s pain and fear and then exposes her to it.

Through some probing he finds his wife fears their cabin, called Eden, located in some remote wilderness. The two of them set out to their cabin to try and expel the pain. But the woods are a foreboding playground, filled with ominous animals and satanic omens. She is given up to mad frenzies in Eden and he continues with his vicious treatments. He and She mutually drive each other mad here and this leads to a chapter wrought with terrible sexual violence.

The violence is extreme and has made “Anti-Christ” a truly controversial film. Some critics have gone so far as to call it S&M pornography. Not so. You must measure a film’s violence with its intention and while the violence is horrific it serves an end.

I think my viewing experience of “Anti-Christ” was much enhanced by reading Roger Ebert’s theory about the meaning of the film. Ebert first points out that the literal definition of Anti-Christ means “one opposed to Christ.” In Ebert’s interpretation, the title “Anti-Christ” suggests not so much that there is an Anti-Christ in the film but that the film takes place in a world opposed to the world of Christ – meaning that Eden, instead of being a place of absolute good is a place of absolute evil. So, he and she are the Adam and Eve of an inherently evil world.

I think that’s a good interpretation. I think it also has some intriguing implications for the epilogue. I won’t give away what happens, but perhaps in the epilogue, an era of goodness begins. Just like Adam and Eve herald an evil world into existence, perhaps he and she herald in a good world by their terrible action. Just some thoughts.


“Anti-Christ” is an utterly baffling film without giving it some good thought. I’m a fan of any movie that forces you to think and so I must declare “Anti-Christ” to be a great film. So many films only require you to sit through them. “Anti-Christ” you must first endure and then puzzle over. It is not a movie for the faint of heart. But if you can see beyond the immediate violence and look to the beautiful, terrifying images you will see a movie like no movie you’ve seen before.


Rating:

On a scale of one to Casablanca this film is a “Blade Runner” (1982)

Rationalization:

Potent images make up the core of “Anti-Christ.” They will stay with you longer than the immediate shock of gut wrenching violence. Lars Von Trier knows how to construct an aesthetically ripe composition that evokes terror in its weirdness. I loved the animals in “Anti-Christ.” I loved the hands in the tree. I loved the woods. This is a horror movie like “The Shining” in that its not just the terrible things that happen that strike you, it is the entirety of the film. “Anti-Christ” is a fully realized composition; one for the philosophers and theologians to love and hate.