by: Letitia
Posted on 04.04.10 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic > Thriller/Suspense > Torture
Release Date: 2009

Lars Von Trier really wants you to know that Anti-Christ is his film–even before we get the title of the movie, von Trier’s name is written across the screen in a hasty, messy scrawl. Von Trier is known for his punishing, gritty independent films, films in which women are usually subjected to all kinds of horrors: in Breaking the Waves, a spunky Emily Watson had to have sex with random men to please her paralyzed husband; in Dancer in the Dark, the adorable Bjork had to beat somebody to death with a tin box. While all of von Trier’s movies have contained horrors, Anti-Christ is von Trier’s first foray into what could be considered a straight-up horror movie–arty, sure, and aiming for (though not quite reaching) “intellectual” heights, sure, but at heart, a horror film.

And there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, the movie would have been more successful if he had tried less for art-house obfuscation and more for the punch-in-the-gut terror that some moments in the movie produce. Although I didn’t love this movie, I respect it, and I think that most reviewers who dismissed it did so for the wrong reasons: they critiqued the violence, the supposed misogyny (more about that later), and the gratuitous gore. I could have stood a lot more of those things (minus the misogyny, which isn’t happening anyway) and less of the navel-gazing hand-held camera shenanigans that populate the first half of the film.

The movie begins with an absolutely gorgeous opening vignette, filmed in black and white, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Defoe (both unnamed in the film) have sex in various parts of their palatial apartment to the tune of a gorgeous Handel aria. As Gainsbourg and Defoe go from room-to-room, their young son toddles from his crib, through the house, and climbs out of a window,  falling to his death. The juxtaposition of the absolutely beautiful scene, music, and sexual pleasure with the death of a young child is the first sign that von Trier is not afraid to really break the taboos of mainstream movies.

After the child’s death, Gainsbourg suffers a mental breakdown: she is filled with guilt and links her own sexuality with the loss of her child. Defoe, who happens to by a psychologist (though not a very good one, based on his methods) decides to take his wife’s mental health into his own hands. He tells her that she has to face her fears, not run from them. He makes her go to the place she fears the most, a cabin in the woods (called Eden, hmmm…) where she worked on her unfinished dissertation about medieval images of women. Von Trier’s heavy-handedness comes through in this first half of the movie, where the viewer is forced to sit through abstract conversations about fear and grief and to ponder the thuddingly obvious symbolism of Eden, death, and sexuality.  But then we get to Eden, and all hell breaks loose. In a good way.

From here, the movie goes from the usual grimy, quick-cut, hand-held camera of Von Trier’s previous movies to a more interesting and lush use of setting and camera. Von Trier creates a terrifying forest, one that looks, on the surface, to be dreamy and lush, populated with beautiful deer and animals. But even the animals are not-quite-right, and the ground burns Gainsbourg’s feet right through her shoes. The sky rains acorns and the wind blows open windows.

I won’t give anything away by discussing what happens in the cabin between Defoe and Gainsbourg, but suffice it to say that this is not a date-movie and will make both men and women cross their legs and grimace with vicarious pain. Von Trier doesn’t hold back in showing damage done to the human body and in making sexual scenes incredibly unsexy.

Ultimately, Anti-Christ is about a woman so consumed with guilt about her child’s death and so convinced of her own culpability that she takes on the misogynistic images of women from history (the woman as the witch, the vagina dentata, the woman as closer to nature, closer to the body, and therefore closer to the devil). The movie doesn’t support misogyny– the character believes herself to be the awful things that women have been accused of being. If von Trier had focused more on Gainsbourg’s own guilt and deepening insanity and less on making a grand statement about nature and evil, then he would have a truly interesting movie. Unfortunately, he feels the need to give us talking foxes and visual metaphors that don’t make sense or make sense too simply to be useful.

I have to stop and give Charlotte Gainsbourg her due for this film. The dialogue throughout the movie is awful–both Gainsbourg and Defoe speak in the careful, deadening tones of a badly-written undergrad philosophy essay–but Gainsbourg puts her all into this role. It’s hard to imagine the emotional depths she goes to, the things she has to do, and how fully she commits to the role of a woman who spends 90% of the movie insane with grief and half-naked. She makes the character neither hat-eable nor easily sympathetic–she is complicated and troubled, but not easy to categorize.

This movie is deeply flawed, but beautiful and awful and truly powerful–it’s more like an opera than a movie, all emotion and expression with little logic. If you go to it willing to overlook some of von Trier’s more tedious bits of arty exposition, it’s well worth the effort.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall: