Antichrist (2009)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist has been called the most controversial movie of the year, an abomination, an orgy of misogynist imagery and a big wet art-film fart yielding a pretentious skid mark painted across the face of the Cannes Film Festival.
I liked it a lot.
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist has been critically received with all the warmth and joy of the second-coming of the Holocaust; because not only is this movie sick beyond human reasoning, it’s explicit and sexual and got enough penis to make Ron Jeremy blush. Do you remember all the gasps of outrage over Dr. Manhattan trotting around in Watchmen with his cosmic blue sausage hanging out; well, wait until those kids get a lot of this cock-a-palooza! This movie has got penis galore (Willem Dafoe’s penis no less) including everything from hardcore penetration (in glorious HD) to a schlong getting broken, and then jerked off after it’s been broken into a bloody climax. Now, horror movies have called blood squibs ‘money shots’ for quite awhile, but I guess Lars felt it was time to start spelling things out to film-goers in a less sly and subtle manner. And for the ladies (you thought you’d get left out) we get vaginas cut up with scissors and enough rampant emotional and sexual abuse to fill sixteen seasons of OZ.
But wait, there’s more; Antichrist isn’t happy to just assault your senses with sexual violence by the bucket load, so it fills out a great deal of its running time pounding you in the face with bizarre and freakish imagery until you start bleeding out the ears. I’m talking about a deer walking around with its dead baby hanging half-way out of its ass in mid-birth, and foxes eating their own intestines while uttering “Chaos Reigns!”, as birds rip apart decomposing baby birds covered in fire-ants. It’s like a Death Metal album has come to life, worms and all. Lars Von Trier has brought the gorehounds of the world a diverse and terrifying art-house buffet of the obscene; featuring every flavor of deranged you’d ever want to sample, from mild, to spicy, to red-hot, and extra-OMGWTF.
Mind you, there are people who like their horror movies plain with nothing on it, so Antichrist might be a little too exotic a dish for them; but for someone who doesn’t mind a side-order of Santa Sangre with his Return of the Living Dead, you might got a kick out of it.
A kick in the balls, sure, but a kick none the less.
So what’s this movie about, Jeff? Glad you asked, random Fatally-Yours.com reader!
Antichrist is about the arrogance of one man who decides he knows better than all the doctors (despite not being one) and takes his wife off her anti-depressant drugs forcing her to face the pain and horror of the death of her child. The husband is cold and aloof regarding the death of his kid, while being condescending towards his wife’s grief, her life’s work regarding the misogynist mass-slaughter of witches by society, and her mental illness. Quickly getting nowhere with his style of therapy the husband decides that in order for his wife to get over her anxiety she has to face her greatest fears. Which means he’s going to take his wife up to an isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere to spend some quality time with nature; and what a nice place it is, with falling acorns going off like gun-shots and animals walking around with still-birthed fetuses hanging out of their asses while everything in sight looks menacing or is eating something else alive. It doesn’t take long before the poor girl goes well and truly out of her mind, and decides since she’s sharing her pain with her therapist; why not take this idea to a whole other level?
Antichrist is built like a typical ‘80s slasher movie or suspense-thriller, with a grieving couple wandering into the woods alone to spend time at a spooky cabin away from civilization where omens warn of danger and a mounting threat builds into an unholy siege of violence. Antichrist has the one character making the typically arrogant decision that the audience knows will end badly, it has the foreboding religious elements including burial grounds and talk of Satanism and Witchcraft, and a hint that the couple’s dead child may be the titular monster, instigating this entire event via a Satanic version of self sacrifice. Antichrist even has a sense of prudishness regarding sexuality, indulging in the more pornographic elements of it, enjoying childish rough and angry sex, while at the same time denying any attempt at physical intimacy or love.
The great thing about Antichrist is that it juggles several concepts at once, including a scathing attack on anti-intellectualism and new-age therapy style approaches to mental illness, while criticizing the ‘at one with nature’ crowd by firmly underlining the harsh and brutal realities of nature and showing our connections to those realities. Antichrist makes the case that while we love and can appreciate the grandeur of the wilderness, we also cannot escape the fact that nature has always been one of our greatest enemies and responsible for the majority of our greatest fears. Antichrist is also a commentary about man’s misogyny and their fear of intimacy and sexuality possibly stemming from their distrust of nature itself. Antichrist shows that men have objectified women as being closer to nature because of their roles as mothers and their natural cycles; and while that can sometimes be seen as a positive stereotype Antichrist makes the case that this particular objectification also renders women terrifyingly alien to men by linking them to the darker aspects of nature that men universally fear. Antichrist’s female character fears the cabin in the woods and the forest, because her own obsession with misogynist views of women has indoctrinated her to the paranoid, hysterical male perspective of the Witch-Hunting eras. The woman feels that the terrifying natural order of the wild is deeply connected to her own darker impulses and desires and in the end, she attempts to free herself from those bonds, by literally cutting what she perceives are her physical ties to that world.
Antichrist is like a cross between Federico Fellini and Friday the 13th; it uses elements of art-film and parody, surrealism and horror cinema, but it exists outside the suffocating structure and rules of those genres as a movie that defies genre and embraces all the elements it needs to make its point. To dismiss this movie as being misogynist or simply a work of shock value or cynicism is reactionary; it reveals more about the critic than the film itself. Antichrist uses the techniques of sensationalism and the shock-value of misogynist visuals to critique sensationalism and misogyny. Antichrist dissects the traditional horror movie with its own nature and tools, setting the conservative elements of horror cinema against itself and reveling in the chaos and iconoclasm that it creates. You can see why this kind of movie has critics befuddled and confused, because it not only indulges and amplifies all of the ugliest stereotypes of genre horror, it simultaneously uses those ugly stereotypes to parody, scrutinize and castrate the genre. Antichrist is a completely free work of art, it’s got no laws, no rules and obeys no code of conduct, its not here to hold our hand and be our babysitter for its running time, and it wants to alarm us. Antichrist may be progressive but it is not soft or obedient or passive.
Ultimately Lars Von Trier has crafted a movie about how mankind irrationally anthropomorphizes nature to deal with its fear of nature; and how that has led to a hysterical oppression against women. In the movie mankind’s fear of nature and of women comes full circle like a self-fulfilling prophecy or a snake swallowing its own tail; taking a woman deranged enough and disturbed enough and making her see herself through the male perspective. Antichrist is not for the timid or the prudish, but it is more than just art-house trash and shock value cynicism. Yes Antichrist is deranged, wounded and horrific, but it is also smart and challenging and none of its imagery exists simply to shock; it all has a point, it just so happens to be a very sharp point.
Check it out.
Available from Amazon
Watch the trailer:
Popularity: 6% [?]
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