Alas, poor Antichrist. Saddled with the ‘scandalous’ tag at Cannes – where the audience cheered and jeered in equal measure – marketed on a highly misleading title and the (mostly unfulfilled) promise of extreme sex and violence, it’s guaranteed to alienate anyone looking for exploitative thrills. Yet in fact that’s not the worst of it. The popcorn-munchers were always a lost cause – but even the few who might appreciate it, the forelock-tuggers and arthouse hounds who dig its high seriousness, are likely to walk out in a huff, dismissing it as the ravings of a vile misogynist. Here’s a film (they’ll say) that paints women – capital-W Woman – as evil, and all but advocates violence against them. “A crying woman,” goes a line in the film, echoing the brutish mediaevals who routinely practised “gynocide”, the murder of women, “is a scheming woman”.
Then again, that line is spoken by a woman – the nameless ‘She’ (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) who grieves along with ‘He’, her husband (Willem Dafoe), after the death of their child – so it’s not quite as simple as it seems. In fact Antichrist is extremely complex, as twisty (and twisted) as the psyche of its creator, Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier. It’s also, indisputably, Not For Everyone: not only are there squirm-inducing moments of violence, but the film is also slow, heavy, arty, call it what you will. Better you should know about this now – even at the risk of missing out – than go in with faulty expectations.
One more thing to know: the film is gorgeous. Not all the time, and not in the psychedelic way of Avatar – quite the opposite – but gorgeous all the same. A scene where ‘She’ imagines herself in the woods conjures one heart-stopping image after another: a small wooden bridge between tall trees, a cabin in the mist, a woman walking in the long grass like a spectral presence. Sometimes the magic is simple, like Gainsbourg’s pale moonlit face – caught in a corner of the frame – as ‘He’ asks her where she’s most afraid, and she pauses then replies: “The woods” (that pause, plus the starkness of the image, gives those words a primal power). Sometimes it’s intricate, like the lengthy Prologue showing the death of the child – a black-and-white opus scored to Handel, with slow-motion droplets and symbolic shagging (the child falls to his death simultaneously with Mum coming to climax). It’s hopelessly pretentious, but so what? It’s gorgeous.
The parents grieve, of course, but in different ways. ‘He’ is measured, rational (he works as a therapist), a little cold. ‘She’ is shattered, over-emotional. We assume the film is saying – and Von Trier lets us assume – that she’s like that because she’s a woman. The film’s dynamic pits bossy, arrogant ‘He’ (“I’m going to teach you how to breathe,” he tells his wife) against hurt, volatile ‘She’ – and she’s pliable but we sense a hidden darkness in her passivity, a darkness repeatedly associated with Nature (at one point the camera even zooms into a potted plant in the hospital room). When the couple venture into the woods – staying at a cabin called Eden – the stage is set for encroaching darkness to crush the husband’s rational convictions. As a talking fox (yes, a talking fox) puts it: “Chaos reigns!”.
Antichrist works on the dynamic of Woman = Nature = Fear, ‘She’ standing for the hidden pre-civilised darkness in human beings – because (as the film makes explicit) ‘Nature’ is also ‘nature’, our chaotic human nature dimly tied in with the forest glades and falling acorns. ‘What does Nature/nature want?’ ‘She’ asks at one point; “To hurt you as much as [it] can,” ‘He’ replies, harking back to our gynocidal ancestors who viewed women as witches. So far, so unnerving – yet the film also has a sting in its tail, a plot twist that questions our assumptions. I won’t say what it is, but remember: “A crying woman is a scheming woman.”
None of this is likely to make sense if you haven’t seen the movie, but briefly: Antichrist isn’t about hatred of women, it’s about the weight of the past – our dark human nature, which we forget at our peril – and Von Trier’s disdain for the value-neutral, beyond-Good-and-Evil practicalities of therapy culture. In a way, what ‘She’ does to ‘He’ is an act of love (though also an act of penance), putting him in touch with a primal nature he’s forgotten – a point reinforced in the ambiguous yet curiously serene Epilogue. And of course a film about the past hanging inescapably heavy is all too appropriate for the story of parents dealing with the death of a child.
Confused? You might be. Maybe it’s inevitable. Von Trier wrote the film (he says) in the throes of depression, as a kind of personal therapy; it’s a purge, not a thesis statement. And of course he does like to confuse people. But Antichrist is gorgeous, and hypnotically tense (or intense) – and it speaks to something deep and half-buried, spiked with its creator’s jaundiced view of humanity. It’s hard to take, but here’s the twisted punchline: I want to see it again.
