Von Trier himself has stated that Antichrist has arisen from his battles with "depression", a claim that I have never quite been able to treat with the cowed and brow-furrowing respect shown by others: Lars von Trier is never exactly on oath with any of his public pronouncements.
In the end, Antichrist is a smirking contraption of a film, a cheeky, nasty, clever device for making us upset about the dead kid, making us scared at the creepy happenings, making us freaked out at the violence, and finally making us convulsed with liberal outrage about violence, misogyny, censorship etc, debates which this cine-prank has been cynically engineered to provoke. But of course none of this is enough for Von Trier, who has to twist the grossout dial clockwise for his final act. The bizarre, hallucinatory moment when Dafoe is addressed by a talking fox has been much mocked, and yet I thought it was witty, risky stuff and there's a nice line about nature being Satan's theatre. There is a disquieting fantasy sequence in which Gainsbourg is seen in long-shot, walking slowly over a bridge in a dream. There is a creepy, subliminal glimpse of a screaming woman's face, although my friend Mark Kermode points out that The Exorcist did this first. Hee, hee! Is he kidding? What do you think?īefore the absurdity sets in permanently and Von Trier's vivisected shaggy-dog story whimpers its painful last, Antichrist does have some freaky moments. Just before the credits, the director flashes up a dedication – to Andrei Tarkovsky, of all the hilariously inappropriate people. This comes much later on, a deliberate arthouse pratfall which makes it utterly clear that Von Trier is just messing. Now, this may be an excellent metaphor for the elimination of pleasure in the cinema, but it is not, as it happens, the film's punchline. After an orgy of sadistic violence against her partner, Gainsbourg takes a very large pair of rusty scissors and decides that she can and will do without her clitoris. Here is where those squeamish about spoilers or violence had better leave the room, go to Netflix and order up a copy of Ladies in Lavender starring Judi Dench. But their solitude in this disturbing forest tips Gainsbourg into a psychotic state, and she becomes obsessed with evil.
This double-pronged assault on your emotions, at once deadpan and deeply crass, is followed by Dafoe (a professional therapist) taking Gainsbourg to a secluded woodland cabin to embark on a radical, drug-free grieving process. While the couple are having sex, their tiny infant son crawls out of the window of the seventh-floor apartment and falls to his death. There's a hardcore penetration shot in among the prettiness, just to keep it real. The first sequence shows the pair making passionate love in the shower, filmed in glossy black-and-white like a perfume ad, to the accompaniment of a yearning soundtrack by Handel. The notional story is about a wealthy, handsome couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. In a way, Von Trier's uncompromising facetiousness and giggling insincerity allow you to sit back and appreciate his technique, of which there is a good deal. I myself could only watch the film's impossibly grisly final 20 minutes through my fingers, and readily concede the brutally effective shock-factor, added to one or two subtler plus-points. He is like the Riddler, cackling over his latest escapade, in front of a cinema auditorium full of Commissioner Gordons, but with no Batman to help us. This is what the commentariat are talking about, and the great man appears to have landed a thermo-nuclear épat. Well, the director has secured the bragging rights for his wildly controversial and explicitly violent spectacle, no question about it.