Movie Review : Antichrist (2009)
There's no one quite like Lars Von Trier making movies today. His work is highly allegorical, but also deeply personal and often fucked up. Watching his films is like witnessing one of these anxious fantasies we all have coming to life. They’re intense. Antichrist was the only entry missing in my Lars Von Trier culture and it's often been called his most intense film. I'm here to tell you it's not. Antichrist is wild, but it's merely a practice swing for what was to come.
Antichrist tells the story of an unnamed married couple, played by Willem Defoe and Von Trier's favorite Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's child wanders out the unlocked window while they were fucking like their lives depended on it. I'm not even kidding. They're raw dogging it. Both are overtaken by grief, but since the husband is a know-it-all therapist, he pulls his wife from psychiatric care in favor of a cabin retreat and things don’t get better for neither of them over there.
Chaos & The Origins of Men
Antichrist is the first movie of Lars Von Trier’s depression trilogy (the other two being Melancholia and Nymphomaniac), where he explores his own apocalyptic feelings through extensive allegories. His ideas in Antichrist are haunting, multifaceted, but somewhat of a scatter shoot. He's mainly questioning the founding narratives of mankind. As his protagonists painfully trudge towards their cabin (conveniently called "Eden") to start over, they are only welcomed by chaos and destruction.
It takes time for the idea to articulate itself and it comes, clumsily enough, through the mouth of a talking fox. But once the husband and the wife make their way to the beginning of time, they gradually lose all sense of who they are and the only thing that’s left is their pain. With the hindsight that Lars Von Trier was suffering from depression when he shot this, it kind of makes sense. When you’re passed a certain point in suffering, everything brings you back to it. It becomes a barrier between your life and you.
In Antichrist, Lars Von Trier asks both sciences (through the husband) and God (through Eden) for answers and both come up empty. It's a demanding and sometimes frustrating because it veers in many directions without constructing meaning, but it’s the point. At least through Von Trier's unwell mind. We're all sentient animals wired to make meaning of what's happening to us, but sometimes there just isn’t, like when your child dies. Silly hardcore shower sex notwithstanding, of course.
But is it good?
Well yeah. It doesn't have the majestic fatalism of Melancholia or the oddball energy of Nymphomaniac, but the pain it communicates is very pure. It's sometimes very literal and shocking to a point of being silly, like Charlotte Gainsbourg masturbates Willem Dafoe and blood squirts out. I wanted to dub over it Corpsegrinder's famous live tirade: "The next song is about a man shooting blood out of his cock. It's called I CUUUM BLOOOD." Once again I'm not kidding. This is an actual scene from the movie.
Unintentionally funny stuff aside, it's confronting to see two human beings stripped everything, except their desires and their pain like this. It makes you wonder if desire and pain are all there is to life, which again I believe was the point of the movie. Lars Von Trier deals with difficult stuff. He's not interested in beauty and harmony. He wants answers to the most difficult and undecipherable questions of life. He just doesn't get more of an answer here, but he does in later depression trilogy films.
*
When Lars Von Trier movies are involved, you have to understand what you’re getting into. It's not going to be a fun and elating experience. It's going to be violent, ugly and confronting. Antichrist more than fulfills its part of the contract in that regard. It's a grueling series of losses and failures. I would say that unlike the following two chapters in the trilogy it doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are unique and overwhelming. I'm glad that I watched it, but it's my least favorite film of the trilogy.
