KO Film Review of Lar's von Trier's Antichrist
Where to start with this one? Ok, well first… thank you Mark for sharing this film with me, from your personal collection. I watched your uncut “Protestant version” and have downloaded the “Catholic version” on iTunes, to watch later. I will also watch the director commentary and then the extras on your bluray copy. As promised, here is my formal film review of Antichrist…
Firstly, Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier) both written and directed by Lars von Trier channeled many other films for me immediately… in reference to his previous work, the cinematography was really in-line with his figurehead status of the Dogma 95 style*, but moves slightly away from certain rules of the style, making it more Modern American arthouse cinema than Dogma. The lighting, a la Dancer in the Dark(2000, Lars on Trier) was natural looking during the main part of the film. The colors are vivid, and the lenses focus moves in and out, sometime racking back and fourth, sometimes completely blurred or just softened. There were some handheld scenes in the film, but I am not convinced it was all shot that way. Sound and image were definitely the most important elements of this film, which I thought also of Dancer. Nature and natural element were a huge focus of this film as well as the story, even greater than Dancer in the Dark.
Other films that I feel influenced this film or paralleled it were: Stephan King’s Misery (1990, Rob Reiner), (Also Stephan King’s) The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick), both big heavy hitting American Horror film, which I couldn’t help but think of while watching Antichrist. I am sure that von Trier would hate me for thinking that, but while I am on American film, there were also parts of Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) that were relevant and they were not only the B&W prologue and Epilog. They were both a slasher-esque psychological thrillers in which this maternal creepy Nature vs. Nurture element comes in. It causes the viewer to think about how much of who/what they have become and act is part of their societal environment or hereditary upbringing.
The structure of this film was like a literary book: Prolog – Chapter 1: Grief – Chapter 2: Pain (Chaos Resigns) – Chapter 3: Despair (Gynocide) – Chapter 4: The three beggars – Epilog.
I really enjoyed the structure of the film, everything except for Chapter 4 being called ‘The Three Beggars” made sense to me. I have read before and logically understand the cycle of grieving as a response to loss, although I have (very luckily) never lost anyone very close to me yet from any sort of tragic death and so therefore cannot entirely relate. I suppose that in inevitable. So the process in which the husband and wife in this film are both individually dealing with their grief from losing their child to falling out a window while they were making love, seemed very difficult and the acting by both Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg was phenomenal at the very least. From what I have heard, losing a child is the worst and most difficult kind of loss to try and deal with. This film which would be categorized as a horror film by most standards, does something really interesting which is presenting every mother or parent perhaps with their worst fear and what comes as a result of that fear…self destruction. Lesson: It is important to deal with fear or it can destroy you.
The husband in the film played by Dafoe’s character was a psychologist trying to treat his wife’s anxiety and depression without drugs prescribed by her doctor because he wanted her to overcome her fear instead of muting it. This film deals with a lot of inner demons; anyone who has suffered with depression or anxiety can appreciate that. I feel, not knowing much about von Trier or his life/experiences that this film was somewhat autobiographical to him, from the little boy being neglected in the beginning to the parents struggling to overcome their issues, even if they may have been metaphors for his own personal struggles. As an artist these ideas need to be pulled and enhanced from somewhere, even if in the film they become an extremely heightened version of reality.
The quote from Chapter One of the Film that stuck out from me for the entire film due to all the flashbacks and Swedish Dream Flashbacks was “ what the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve” from American author of the Think and Grow Rich series Napoleon Hill (1937). Lars von Trier’s use of flashbacks and dream scenes according to the quote made it seem that all of the unfortunate event in the film were created in the minds of the parents and that their thought materialized the fears they had worked so hard to overcome. A contemporary film that deals with flashbacks in the very same of as Antichrist is Black Swan (2010, Darren Aronofsky) how the main characters are struggling so hard to overcome their demons or darkened psychologically anxiety ridden fearful states that is ends up demolishing them. I see a ton of parallel elements between these two films, especially in camera movement, sound, and of course the hallucinogenic flashbacks/dreams. The reassembling of these flashbacks and dreams is a modernist approach to filling in temporal spaces in the storyline where past events and dreams (fictional past/present/hallucinations) might help to intervene with the present flow of the films narrative.
Lastly, I would just like to address the explicit images in Antichrist and how important they are to the film. Because I have only seen the “Protestant” un-cut version of this film, I am unaware of how the edited version deals with the explicit sex-scenes which are integral to the films narrative. If there is one thing in which this film does to make itself ‘arthouse’ it is the scenes with nudity. It creates something raw and true about nature and the origin of humanity. The psychoanalytic implications of the main characters flashbacks occur during these explicit sex-scenes because that is when the initial tragedy of the son dying took place, while the husband and wife were having sex. These scenes with the flashbacks/dreams portray how the wife’s own memories are stored, repressed and rationalized.
This film is aesthetically so very beautiful. I recommend anyone to watch it for that alone, but it is definitely not for the prude or faint of heart. I had to watch it in the afternoon while taking intense notes so that I did not let my psyche get to entangled with the story.
*Dogma 95 Manifesto: The purity of filmmaking: shot on location, using only natural props found there, camera has to be hand-held and sound recorded directly, film has to be shot in the 1:33:1 format, in color, and without filters or lab reworking, has to be set in the present, and could not include superficial action, and above all the director must not be credited and pledge that the film would not be an artful work but “ a way of forcing the truth out of my characters and the setting”.
