Despite scenes of brutal realism, it’s not to be taken literally, and yet while it has dream-like sequences, it is not a dream either. Von Trier eschews the conventions of any identifiable genre and mixes chilly realism with horror movie stylizations while an otherwise barren soundtrack is scattered with moments of classical and experimental music to intensify the schizophrenic nature of the experience.Īntichrist is a horror but not a horror film it’s deadly serious but also an absurd joke. What threatened to be a trite melodrama becomes an ambiguous psychological shadow play drawing on elements of mythology, history and ingrained marital issues. During the course of their retreat, events take a devastating turn as threatening omens of death and doom emerge from the mysterious forest and the hidden folds of their minds. It stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as She, a guilt-stricken mother, and Willem Dafoe, as He, her cold, rational therapist husband who tries to bring her back to life in the densely wooded seclusion of their rustic cabin. This harrowing tale of a married couple whose son accidentally plunges to his death from an open window while they are making love, is von Trier’s grimmest and most transgressive work to date.
Even so, with Antichrist, von Trier has gone beyond seeming ugly he may be a troll himself, planting shards in our eyes at a time when foreign cinema is trying to compete with Hollywood’s lucrative sentimentality. The main gripe against von Trier is that his films’ art house pretensions refuse to speak to any specific audience – aesthetic issues that expose the old fissures between art house and U.S.-centric commercial filmmaking. This contradiction can be resolved, however, once we accept that von Trier’s life and work are given to us as a seamless fictional whole and that all fiction is concoction and subject to multiple interpretations. In Stig Björkman’s Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier, Lars von Trier launches the documentary by proclaiming with a malicious grin, “I’ll gladly assert that everything said or written about me is a lie.” Later in the film, he describes his own life as a fabrication, yet his long-time producer, Peter Jensen, says that he never lies.