New York Film Festival Review: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist
There is nothing I like more on a rainy New York Saturday than being emotionally abused by filmmakers. And so I set out to see Lars von Trier’s new film at the New York Film Festival (trailer below). I arrived early, afraid of the lines that plague film festivals, and for the first time in years, I was nervous going into the theater. I had heard and read so much about the film that I honestly thought it was going to be the most shocking thing ever filmed. So says the hype. (Yes, I know giving in to hype is a mark of my social weakness, but I couldn’t help it. You wouldn’t be able to either.)
Antichrist is the story of a couple (known only as “He” and “She”) recovering from the death of their young son. Nick fell out of a window while they were having sex all over the house in all manner of positions in an extremely graphic fashion. She is utterly destroyed by the death of her son, and She enters what Freud would call melancholia, as She has great trouble working through her grief. He is a therapist and quickly passes judgment on her treatment by what we assume is a mental hospital. He removes her from their care and decides to take on the role of therapist in addition to husband. His solution? Exposure therapy. All manner of insanity and disturbance and gruesomeness ensue from this one bad decision (she is clearly not ready for this therapy).
You see, Lars von Trier makes films that I refer to as “anvil-on-the-chest” movies. You sit in the theater or your living room feeling like there is this unbelievable weight sitting on your chest, and you long for the film to end because you know you won’t be able to breathe properly until it does. You feel abused when you watch his films, but you watch them anyway. Why? Because no matter how much he angers you (and he does) or how judgmental and (sometimes) pretentious he can be, Lars von Trier makes a damn good movie.
The thing that ultimately makes his films work is that—no matter how exacting and stubborn and abusive he is—he trusts his audience. He expects (hopefully rightly) that we are as smart as he is. He asks us questions, but he never ever gives us answers. That’s our job. We have to bring something to the table. Watching Breaking the Waves, you are expected to be able to weigh in on the nature of sexuality, how it is different for men and for women, and how that plays out inside a marriage. Watching Antichrist, you are expected to know the allusions to the Bible and the history of gynocide. And you are supposed to be able to write your own conclusions to the arguments he presents. And what arguments they are.
At the heart of this film is a discussion on the nature of men and women. He is a rational and reasonable being. She is an irrational slave to Nature. Nature is representative (as usual) of the other. In this case the other is She. He is the primary point of reference for the film, so when She says that “Nature is Satan’s church,” we spend only a moment wondering if She’s right. He steps in to tell her that her grief-stricken mind is manipulating her thinking. She cannot act in a way that is outside her Nature. And if this be true, both He and She end up being exactly right. By the end of the film, we are left with the idea that Nature is, in fact, evil, and all that derives from it must be evil as well.
So we move away with the notion that women are evil, and in the end, so is Nick—the son that came from woman. Early in the film, She accuses He of being emotionally disconnected from them both. A person of reason is not capable of the passionate love She has for her son, so when we learn that She chose to come to Eden (yes, Eden) alone with her son, it comes as no surprise. By this time, we’ve grown accustomed to the opposition Lars von Trier has set up. It is her illness that tempts him back to Eden, and one might guess (with no necessary reassurance) that this has been the conceit all along. Has She been feigning insanity? Is this a conscious effort on her part to trap him? One cannot say for sure, but it seems that such a complete picture is not necessary for the film to function on the many levels it does.
Lars von Trier is not making a simple horror film. No, of course not. We would never expect that, would we? He’s making a drama that relies on many of the conventions of horror to carry its message. It’s strange to see him break from his Dogme 95 style of filmmaking and take a turn toward the supernatural. He does this complete with the occasional jump cut, nightmare images, extreme brutality, and even a moment in which one person throws the weapon he’s managed to procure in the direction of the person who once wielded it (how very Jamie Lee Curtis).
What we get out of these moments, however, is something very different from those of traditional horror films. The brutality I mention is not, as you’d expect, physical. It is psychological. This is not to say there are no moments of physical brutality. There are, and they are definitely extreme, but von Trier shows great restraint in his use of them. This restraint then translates into a much more powerful experience of the physical brutality we do see.
The psychological brutality, however, is relentless and painful. As audience members began to become uncomfortable with the film (hey, not everyone has seen Inside), they were laughing at the change of chapter, at the computer-animated animals, at the final acts of physical violence. This was not the laughter of people who found these images humorous. This was the laughter of people who were barely able to comprehend the things that were flashing across the screen. This was the laughter of people who weren’t sure if Lars von Trier was right.
The audience was questioning all that rationality that controls their lives. They were questioning the nature of their relationships and their own sexuality. Sexuality is, again, a theme in his film, and he seems to continue discussing the power dynamics of sexuality with his audience. And who wins in this film and what does it say? These are questions no one can answer with certainty.
The nature of man and woman is familiar ground for him, but this is the first time it seems he has managed to have it play out so literally on film. The primary debate of the film is really just this: Does that which is natural to woman (Nature/Evil) and man (Reason/Good) hold true in the most extreme of situations? According to von Trier, it does. In fact, it propels those extreme situations. It is the driving force of his narrative, and it is the driving force between men and women according to him.
In the end, there is not a lot to say about this film without destroying the experience of it for anyone who plans to see it. Questions abound walking out of the theater, but the most important ones are ones you can answer on your own—at least that is what the film counts on. As a seasoned viewer of horror (more so than most people I know), I was not as shocked as others by the events of the last thirty or forty minutes.
The friends who attended the film with me came away with much the same analysis I have provided here (with a few notable quotations). One said, “I thought I knew why I had sex. Now I’m not so sure.” Another simply said, “I can only say I have never seen anything like that.” It’s possible to walk away with both of these feelings. And no, even I have never really seen anything like this. I have seen many of Lars von Trier’s films, and I remember the dynamics between Bess and her husband in Breaking the Waves and between Selma and the cop in Dancer in the Dark. And then, of course, there is Grace in Dogville and Manderlay. I know that Lars von Trier has the most disturbed notion of male/female relationships any filmmaker has ever displayed. This does not make it easier to take. The themes of the film are familiar to his audience, and they are taken to their end.
One cannot help but wonder where he can go from here. He cannot possibly take this concept any further, can he? It would be foolish to assume he can’t. This may have been the most extreme of his arguments, but it is also the most honest. It reveals a side of Lars von Trier that has been hidden under the surface of his films in the past. He has said that he thinks this is his greatest film. I don’t know if I would agree, but I would agree that it is a kind of mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to go to the fringes of film and feel something they haven’t felt since they first saw A Clockwork Orange. This is a film for people looking for the edges of emotion when they reach that place where there are no longer words to describe them. This is terrifying precisely because it is pure experience. And it is its status as being predominantly unknowable that makes it as powerful as it is.
