Antichrist

It’s said that the worst possible trauma a parent can experience is outliving their children, and, therefore, burying them, mourning their loss, and living out the rest of their lives with a gaping emotional wound, wrapped with new tourniquets each day, never completely healing, never fully returning to that approximation of wholeness towards which we strive. Stasis is broken, and the psychological anguish never quite subsides, like a vengeful tide bent on wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting shore. This film tells this story, replete with all the vulnerability and instability that such trauma leaves behind it. More or less one film split into two hour-long segments, Antichrist succeeds in spades for the initial half, then unfortunately devolves into a series of painful sadomasochism.

A couple loses their child while they make love (in the first of several truly pornographic sex scenes). In the midst of an orgasmic experience, their toddler son makes a fateful descent, ending whatever semblance of normalcy that may have existed for this disturbing couple. Willem Defoe plays the husband, a therapist who turns his work on his wife (played unsettlingly well by Charlotte Gainsbourg), a woman struggling with the loss of her son and, essentially, her own sanity. This story is constructed in successive chapters, each taking its name from successive levels of grief coping mechanisms. By the close of the credits, as a fox says during the film (oddly, the only anthropomorphized animal in the film), “Chaos reigns.” At times, it seems, quite literally.

The director, Lars Von Trier, was apparently struggling with bouts of severe depression during the creation of this film, and it could not be much more evident. The woman evolves from a seemingly normal individual coping with the loss of her son into a sadomasochistic being, like Jekyll permanently becoming Hyde. Von Trier creates a surreal, subtle world in which these two (and only two) characters swim through the sea of grief that has swallowed their lives. With hints of expressionism, he forms a fairly brilliant series of scenes with pitch-perfect dialogue. During the first half.

The second half of the film continues the trend of the preceding hour momentarily, before running as far from subtlety as possible, in a sequence of events that are as painfully unnatural as they are unnaturally painful, a convoluted cycle of torment and mutilation. Though almost certainly intentional, this retreat from subtlety and nuance is also a retreat from the art created in the first hour of the film, ending in blatant exhibitionism, a form of psychological and emotional public masturbation.

If the film had maintained the coherence and form of the first half, Von Trier would have created one of the best films of the year, a psychological film, with equal parts tragedy, thriller, and expressionism. Unfortunately, he takes a tragic story with fantastic performances and wonderful cinematography and twists it into an indulgent example of performance art gone horribly wrong. The excellent first half is the only aspect that makes this film worth watching; after that, it’s best to turn it off and leave the film at its best. A kind of tragedy in and of itself.

Rating: 3/4 Stars