A dead calf swings from a fawn’s hindquarters a baby bird is swarmed by ants and devoured by a hawk.
In nature, “Satan’s Church” as she calls it, the world is destroying itself and shows no mean intention of destroying them in the process. Gainsbourg’s agonizing depression, it seems, is demonic rather than psychological-the wolf whose psychiatric sheep’s clothing leads Dafoe’s analyst (equipped with hypnosis, trust exercises, and thought-pyramids) into the heart of a forest subtly titled Eden. The couple’s respective reactions to grief-Dafoe’s intellectual distance manifest in his treatment of Gainsbourg, whose psychic pain becomes physical-exaggerate at a rate that reaches the suspenseful around the second act, and plows right through to the comically ridiculous by the third.
Antichrist movie scenes free#
Instead, it is the satisfied, almost sly look that the child gives the camera as he turns from the scene of his parents-Freud’s “primal scene”-that remains the only concept throughout all of “Antichrist” that stands, free of contradiction, parody, or comment.įrom here, Von Trier fashions a conceit from the juxtaposition of modern psychotherapy and bald psychoanalytic symbols. But this image of a child falling in space, evocative of the fertile-however unambitious-dynamic of existential dread, is not the one Von Trier adopts for the propulsive force at the heart of the film.
The image of the child falling in the snow-filled sky to the sound of Händel’s “Rinaldo” is just one of the scenes that impress-if only in passing-in “Antichrist,” and builds credit for the film to develop, if nothing else. In the film’s highly-stylized prologue, the black and white, slow-motion sequence of Dafoe and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, making intense and explicit love is intercut with their son wandering into the room, witnessing their coitus, climbing out an open window, and falling. The ostensible plot is ripped right out of the J-horror handbook: a young married couple travel to an isolated woodland retreat to deal with the grief following their toddler son’s death. But the gesture backfires, and instead of the subject of endless discussion that it aspires to be, “Antichrist” is merely an entertaining, if catastrophically ham-fisted horror film. When Willem Dafoe’s unnamed therapist-husband character exclaims toward the end of his wife’s treatment, “You don’t have to understand me, just trust me!” it may as well be Von Trier’s claim for the entire film. Instead, Von Trier seems satisfied with a set of auteuristic half-measures intended to flummox or thwart critical impingement. Just as sure, the film never provides-nor so much as even suggests-a measure of forward-motion that would constitute a remotely critical synthesis for all the bizarre, absurd, or utterly inane things that manage to find their way into the 100 minutes that comprise it. To be sure, “Antichrist” is rife with all of these things. Hilarity abounded over a woodland fox that inexplicably speaks. Outrage circulated over controversy-stoking scenes of castration and genital self-mutilation, misogynist diatribe, and stultifying psychoanalytic pedantry. Already infamous for its disastrous reception at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival, the film seemed destined for a sort of immortality even before it hit worldwide release this month: the immortality of perpetual debate. It’s an almost hallucinatory sense of confusion that pervades Lars Von Trier’s latest feature, the dubiously titled “Antichrist,” in its viewing experience as in its very composition.
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