But before Lars von Trier breaks down, he manages to give his viewers something extremely powerful, excruciating and nerve-wrecking to take home with them. What starts as a hard-hitting account of grief and pain, halfway turns into a supernatural horror film. The story could never be treated as a coherent tale of the same genre.
It was a matter of time before someone did it and Gainsbourg got there first. His passive aggressive therapist-like attitude is infuriating, for both Gainsbourg and the viewers – until one of the two violently attacks him in the middle of the wilderness and cuts his genitals off. An interesting addition to his already seriously messed-up character is the fact that he’s a psychologist, trying to “cure” his slightly less sick-in-the-head wife, with mind games and emotional blackmails. As we watch on, although we once disliked both parents equally, the scale starts tilting on Dafoe’s side. In the end, Willem Dafoe earns it, but not after his on-screen wife hasn’t put enough of a fight. I felt that both Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe competed fiercely for the title. As we get to know his parents, we grow to fear them, mistrust and hate them – which greatly affects our relationship with their writer-director as well.ĭon’t ask me who the Antichrist is in this case. Although it all looks, from this point on, as though everybody involved is as good as doomed, the audience soon realizes that the child actually gets it best, considering the circumstances. Knowing exactly where his life is head ing with these two people as his parents, he decides to check out as early as he can.
This leads to a series of mishaps, beginning with their newborn baby jumping out of the window. What happens in Antichrist is that Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe have sex. Antichrist is perhaps an extreme scream for sympathy and an on-screen breakdown that somewhat causes him to fail getting across any point he might have been trying to make. Is the filmmaker taking his disappointment too far, or is he merely telling it as it is? I would like to think that von Trier’s evident frustration with the world surrounding him is forcing him to shout louder and louder hoping that he’ll eventually be heard. How right or wrong of a portrayal of our world may his story be, we probably all stand on different sides when it comes to reaching a verdict. “Chaos” does “reign” in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – the way it does in all of his films.
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