Lars gratia artis: von Trier’s hardcore horror film Antichrist is an arthouse endurance test worth taking

We may as well get this out of the way: How does a critic go about recommending a film like Lars von Trier's Antichrist, "recommendation" being understood within the usual consumer-guide, pointing-thumbs framework? I happen to think that Antichrist is a film of great beauty, mind-melting horror and confounding philosophical ambition—but it's also cruel, sometimes over the top, and never less than a frontal assault. The various self-shearings and lopping-offs performed by its female lead, Charlotte Gainsbourg, are enough to make Mel Gibson's mangled Messiah look like, well, a bloody pussy. In other words, the conundrum is this: Antichrist is one of the most fascinating films of the year, and at certain moments one of the best. But you really might want to stay away.

Denmark's von Trier is without a doubt one of the giants of contemporary cinema. But apart from a disdain for weak-kneed granola liberalism, the most consistent thread in von Trier's cinema has been female suffering, usually at the hands of a socially empowered mob. While the director himself has claimed solidarity with his women protagonists and described them as his stand-ins, many just aren't buying it. Von Trier has been accused of unrepentant misogyny, of essentially getting off on the cinematic degradation of women. And so it is with Antichrist. As if crushing all negative responses to his work and distilling them into a potent liquid extract, von Trier's latest is either (a) an inquiry into misogyny, and how it can deform the female psyche; or (b) von Trier's paranoid fantasy of women as psychotic man-hating killers in league with Satan, untamed Nature, and other sticky, dangerous things.

The basics: "She" (Gainsbourg, in a performance that veers between exposed wire and open wound) is an academic struggling to complete a dissertation on images of "Gynocide," grotesque depictions through the ages of women as hell-bent harpies. Her husband, "He" (Willem Dafoe), is a therapist. In the prologue, von Trier shows us, in operatic slow motion, the couple's son Nicky climbing out of his crib in the middle of the night, glimpsing his parents having intense sex, and then crawling out a fifth-story window. As von Trier displays in almost preposterously gorgeous detail, little Nicky drops to his death at the very moment his mother achieves orgasm.

This is silly post-Freudianism. But as "She" fails to overcome her grief, her trauma evolves into madness. As "He" might say, drawing useless Christmas-tree diagrams to chart his wife's torment, at this point Antichrist's overt themes actually move well past reaction formation into the realm of Nietzsche's "transvaluation of values"—an overturning of natural order. Before long, "He" and "She" retreat to the woods—and their cabin called, yes, Eden—for "therapy sessions" which allow "He" to conduct the relationship, sexual and otherwise, from a warped position of power.

As photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle, the Eden sequences are among the most astonishing in Antichrist, the forest-enshrouded cabin emitting an otherworldly light and a procession of dream visions reminiscent of Bergman and especially Tarkovsky (to whom Antichrist is dedicated). Although the slow, patient near-mysticism of the movie's first half works hard to conceal it, there is something rather straightforward in the woman's psychological trajectory. The unfortunate collision of agony and ecstasy provokes all manner of anxieties, but "She" has a gradual revelation: What if everything those superstitious patriarchs have said about women through the ages is actually true? Her descent into this insane idea is not some sort of twisted thought-crime against feminism, so much as it is the final breakdown of all her defenses against the piercing images of woman-hating. A comparison would be Hari Rhodes's psychotic African-American Klansman in Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, who transforms into a white supremacist in psychic defense against racist fury. "She" succumbs to history's worst definitions of her, if only to regain a modicum of control, to find some relief and some answers.

All of this sounds heady and extraordinarily challenging, and it is. So why the ambivalence? Well, before it's all over—warning: spoilers follow—Gainsbourg becomes a sort of vengeful wraith and goes apeshit on "He" with some extremely rusty tools. (The title may be read as the sickest of cinematic in-jokes: Dafoe suffers for mankind's sins again, just as he did for Scorsese, but "this time it's personal.") She babbles about an imaginary constellation that von Trier helpfully visualizes with some disgusting animatronic animals, including a now-infamous talking fox (not voiced by George Clooney, alas). Which reminds me: the movie's even funny at times, when it isn't erupting gore like the Grand Guignol. But Variety still calls it "a big fat art-film fart." Lest we forget, however: flatulence takes guts.

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