Antichrist

Von Trier is a difficult fellow to get to grips with. With one hand he can be deconstructing American racial politics with a side order of black comedy in Manderlay; with the other he’s putting Bjork through her paces in Dancer in the Dark, serving up a truly unique take on the modern day musical. That climaxes in a hanging. To say he’s predictable would be lazy, at best.

But that’s exactly what some of his detractors have criticised him of being with his latest venture, Antichrist. Part melodrama, part horror, part rumination on the nature of religion, it’s not an easy film to digest and in many ways defies description. In fact a so-called review of the film is hardly doing it justice – clichéd as it may be, it really is an ‘experience’. Many of you may have noticed it has split the critical community right down the middle, with one-star and five-star reviews appearing all over the place – a middling three-star review looks to be something Antichrist may never get to wear on its blood-stained sleeve.

Without giving away too much, Antichrist is, on one level, an all-encompassing subversion of Western religion: instead of life, we have death; where Eve spoke to the snake in the Garden of Eden, this time it’s Adam… who gets to chat with a mutilated fox, naturally. However this is simplifying things, Von Trier’s big box of ideas attempting to reach far beyond a mere mickey-take of all things God-like. Swirling around the central performances of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an unnamed couple coming to terms with a tragic accident are a whole range of signs, signifiers, images and outright allegories – some of which will trigger an instant post-film debate, others provoking galling, sideshow-style amusement. But this all depends on your point of view. Clearly Von Trier wants to provoke, to intimidate, to elicit a reaction so primal and visceral from his audience that they either sit tight and applaud his brilliance or walk out after the opening act.

No matter which viewpoint you end up subscribing to, you cannot ignore Antichrist – in the director’s body of work so far, although it alludes to images he has toyed with before (the weight that becomes attached to Dafoe’s leg recalls Nicole Kidman’s Grace in Dogville, pitifully chained to an iron wheel), it almost stands alone – the films it brings to mind are ones you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the Danish auteur, such as Neil Jordan’s The Company Of Wolves and Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill. Uncomfortable? Yes. Divisive? Most definitely. Predictable? Hardly. Forgettable? Not a chance.