Movie Review: Antichrist

James Verniere - Boston Herald

'Antichrist' Cannot be Saved

Antichrist: D

Just in time for trick-or-treat comes graying enfant terrible Lars von Trier'sattempt to make the art-film version of "Saw VI," coincidentally opening on the same day, complete with a Halloween-ready wicked witch. Lars, there's a world of difference between scary and outright disgusting.

In "Antichrist," or as I have redubbed it, "The Realm of the Senseless," a couple played by shock-visaged Willem Dafoe and boyishly skinny Charlotte Gainsbourg try to recover from the accidental death of their toddler son (it happened while they were schtupping in their bedroom) by taking a trip to a wood named Eden (yep) and schtupping and talking nonstop.

It might have been different if they appeared to enjoy the sex. But half the time Gainsbourg's "woman," a writer whose thesis "Gynocide" is the history of men's endless genocidal war against women, weeps and wails during copulation, while Dafoe's "man," a shrink by profession, grinds dutifully.

It doesn't take long for a fox to appear, eating its afterbirth and announcing, "Chaos reigns," and for the already unstable, grief-wracked woman to go even farther off the deep end and sexually maim her husband and do something equally awful and unwatchable to herself in extreme close-up. I don't think I have ever been forced to watch something as disturbing in a movie.

Steeped in leaden Freudian and Christian symbolism, "Antichrist" suggests an Ingmar Bergman movie to the 10th power. It's "Unwatchable Scenes From a Marriage" and "Cries, Whispers and a Very Big Scissors." Opening scenes suggest this is also in part von Trier's variation on the wonderfully wacked-out Nic Roeg classic "Don't Look Now" (1973).

The much-abused "man" is the Wile E. Coyote of maimed and mutilated husbands, crawling through these woods with a hole bored through his femur and a grind stone (!) bolted to it.

Watching "Antichrist" with my colleagues -- which von Trier has the gall to dedicate to Andrei Tarkovsky -- I could hear shrieking, moaning and groaning in the theater, not all of it coming from the screen. The film is divided into three chapters headed "Pain," "Grief" and "Despair." No comment.

While the landscape imagery, "freeze-motion" shots and Lynchian sound effects are marvelously evocative, the film is almost ludicrously hysterical and histrionic. Take my word for it. You do not want to spend 100 minutes inside von Trier's skull. As someone who went in and got out, I can tell you it is one screwed-up trip in there. Analyze this, Lars.

Not rated. No one under 18 will be admitted.

("Antichrist" contains gruesome imagery, sexually grim activity, nudity, a child in peril and a full von Trier of other unpleasantries.)

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