Antichrist

The lack of relief, of any kind, is the comedy. The sheer endurance-test nature of the material takes on its own satirical velocity without undermining the seriousness of the violence, which is graphic in a way that Mother!, with its MPAA R-rating, can’t approach. Nor does it dull the power of the script’s various subtexts, which are nightmarishly contradictory where Aronofsky’s are, finally, far too cute to be unsettling. Mother! solves itself, but Antichrist remains wide open, like a wound.

Von Trier has mobilized the resources of horror cinema to delve into the long history of “monstrous femininity” and misogyny—not to reassure us that it’s all in the past, or easily curable by therapeutic platitudes, but to make us feel the true horror of facing our buried fears and conflicts. And that is surely the aim of art that matters.

Hypnotic. If I had to write a one-word review of this film, that would be the one. I knew this film would live up to my expectations in a scene where therapist husband Willem Dafoe says “close your eyes … and imagine” to wife Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is going mad with grief over the death of their son. I closed my eyes too and sank into my chair too, and it was as if Lars was semi-hypnotizing me too.