Avis des critiques

[Antichrist] is one of those films that defies a simple positive or negative response... What I do know is that I couldn’t take my eyes off a lot of the movie... Antichrist alternately intrigued and repulsed me, and the two reactions had battled each other to a draw by the time [it] was over.

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.

What is striking about Lars von Trier’s tale, biblical and bleak in an Old Testament manner, of a descent into the depths of suffering and desolation, is the beauty of its images. They recall a bevy of ‘art cinema’ classics.

Though chaotic, fragmented, and pretty goddamn demented, to dismiss von Trier’s work as mere torture porn would be disingenuous and immature. Antichrist is a difficult piece from a difficult director... From the first poetically gorgeous and unnerving frames, you can tell what you are experiencing is nothing less than a work of art.

For 70 minutes, "Antichrist" is a rare exploration of pain, featuring two actors collaborating with each other in agonizing and intimate ways. It also contains some of the best work Gainsbourg has ever done on screen. And then - if I put it more gently I wouldn't really be saying it - director Lars von Trier loses his mind.

ANTICHRIST, Lars von Trier's little monster, has the barest, though certainly not the humblest, of beginnings. A horror film, a scaffolding built out of twigs and bones, on to which von Trier can hang animal skins, human limbs, and the sickest jokes his head can brew up. The man is Willem Dafoe and the woman is Charlotte Gainsbourg. There's no monster; only the two of them, alone, with hammers, scissors and a few centuries worth of nightmares. This is a film made out of glistening bile.

The scandal of “Antichrist” is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

Antichrist is most notable for Gainsbourg's unbridled performance and for the photography of Anthony Dod Mantle... For a hymn to panic and hostility, the movie is curiously artful. But only the most sympathetic viewers will find that its poetry outweighs its belligerence.

Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. The ways they’re called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. They respond without hesitation. More important, they convince.

Is Antichrist exploitation or critique? Revolting, ridiculous, or revelatory? A disaster or a masterwork? Maybe it's all of the above: offensive, stupid, sick, brutal, deeply sad, and strangely, hauntingly magnificent.

Antichrist is an exorcism of the foulness and unmitigated hatred stewing inside notorious provocateur Lars von Trier... But the fact is, this is moving cinema; whether you’re moved to love it, moved to hate it, or it just churns your stomach with wretched bile, Antichrist will undoubtedly inspire a passionate reaction.