Critics reviews

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.

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.

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.

Although there is much to suggest that von Trier is once again up to his usual button-pushing tricks, orchestrating explicit references to Freud, disparaging portrayals of academic feminist studies, and a nauseatingly physical final act like a master puppeteer, the film increasingly gives itself over to chaos.

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.

Truth be told, the movie is filled with a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. But the images stick. It may be full of shit, but it's Von Trier's shit.

It would seem impossible for a film to be both fully in command and wholly deranged, but that’s Von Trier magic in a nutshell.