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Charlotte Gainsbourg discovers the downside to marathon sex in Antichrist, a dark tale of parents coping with the loss of a child.

ANTICHRIST
Written and directed by Lars von Trier
Metro Cinema, Apr 22, 24-26, 30 and May 1-3
****

Antichrist, the latest from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, is the kind of movie you fight tooth and nail against liking. It features such delightful things as genital mutilation, a toddler falling out a window to his death, and a bloodied fox proclaiming, “Chaos reigns!” At the same time, it carries hefty intellectual baggage, wanting to investigate hifalutin notions of mourning, sex, death, and mythology by putting a distraught married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) through emotional and physical hell.

And yet somehow, despite the massive odds against him, Von Trier manages to pull off this high wire act. I’m as surprised as anyone to be saying this, but Antichrist is a daring, devastating achievement. It shook me far deeper than any film has in years, and made me genuinely nauseous for hours afterward — so make sure you clear your schedule for the rest of the night, because chances are you won’t be a very cheery companion.

The film is told in chapters, and opens with Dafoe and Gainsbourg in the midst of a graphic marathon sex session so intense they don’t notice their son Nic has woken up from his nap early. He climbs out of his crib, wanders over to an open window, and tumbles onto the pavement below. It’s a tragic scene, but Von Trier keeps the audience at arm’s length from the true horror of the situation, shooting in regal black and white and using an overpowering classical soundtrack. This distancing is a crucial strategy: we need to not be able to imagine what the couple is feeling, because they’re about to go places we can barely fathom.

Grief affects the couple in vastly different ways. Gainsbourg very nearly self-destructs, threatening to kill herself and ending up in the hospital, while Dafoe — who was, by all appearances, a distant husband and father — retreats into his more familiar role as a therapist. He meddles with his wife’s medication, and eventually convinces her that the best way to push through her grief is to face it head on. So they head back to the cabin where Gainsbourg and Nic spent the previous summer while she was writing her thesis, a labyrinthine, scrapbook-like work called Gynocide.

Out in the woods, however, nature is revealed as equally barren and vengeful: everywhere you look are gnarled old trees and hawks ripping baby birds limb from limb. The only symbol of vitality is the constant cloud of acorns that rains down on the cabin’s roof like a Biblical plague. It’s here that Dafoe begins his homespun series of experiments to help Gainsbourg with her grief — and here that both spouses realize how damaged and dangerously spiteful the other has become.

There’s a whole lot to unpack here, and Von Trier has self-consciously piled on several layers of mythology and metaphor to parse, but on its most basic level Antichrist is a harrowing look at the wildly unpredictable process of grieving. Both characters do gruesome things that some critics had zero patience for, but it all comes from a place that, to me, seems utterly genuine; to take one example, Gainsbourg masturbates on the forest floor, then cuts off her own clitoris with scissors because, for her, sex and death have become horribly and irrevocably intertwined. She loves her body for having created Nic, but detests it because those same selfish desires are the reason he’s dead.

The other big charge leveled against the film is that it’s misogynist, but I don’t quite buy that. Sexism implies that one gender triumphs over the other, and there are simply no winners here. It’s mutually assured destruction. If anything, Von Trier is acknowledging the sensitivities of gender politics and using them to up the stakes — the film oscillates several times between which gender can be called the villain, and while Dafoe and mankind may emerge slightly triumphant in the end, the scoresheet has to be a grisly draw.

That being said, the chaos isn’t entirely controlled. There are definitely areas where Von Trier seems to be pressing buttons for the pressing’s own sake — he did name the film Antichrist, after all. And the whole animals-as-harbingers-of-doom angle, while giving the material a nice nudge into old-school fable, still feels a bit under cooked and oblique.

It’s not a movie-going experience that anyone in their right mind would describe as pleasurable, yet Antichrist fits so many of the adjectives we use to define essential cinema: bold, unsettling, and unforgettable. You may despise, the things that Von Trier wants to show you, but on the contrary, it’s all the more reason to take a long, unflinching look — you just might be surprised by what reflects back.