Antichrist (2009)

I was curious about what Lars von Trier has been up to lately so I went to watch his latest movie, The Antichrist. It surely has been accused of being misogynistic and now, having seen it, I must agree.

The story: a therapist and his academic partner looses their small child while immersed in sex. She is grieving; he is applying his therapist's skills to her grief. They travel to the woods because that is the place that she says she fears the most. He wants her to open up to the fear. Their place in the wood is no paradise. This is an unsettling place where nature itself seems to be evil. And she gradually becomes a part of this great, mysterious Evil.

Antichrist is not misogynistic in the Strindbergian sense. von Trier has put together a cinematic nightmare in which women are evil creatures who will submit to no Man's comforting attempts towards Understanding (or Therapy). I don't think this is very interesting (Strindberg, at least, is interesting even though he might have been a douchbag) because von Trier just plays around with these clischés (oh! mother/whore/witch/baaad mother! inner nature & nature-nature!), he doesn't do anything more than that. So NATURE is evil and NATURE is somehow .... Woman. "Nature is Satan's church". Female sexuality is "dangerous", a warped, evil force of nature... Bored now! I didn't find the movie any more appealing or thought-provoking from a technical point of view. And if this is to be the great battle against the dream/nightmare of Rationality, then, I don't get it. Some critics impressed by Antichrist have said that von Trier has successfully elaborated on his own Inferno and perhaps even a cultural Inferno. But I have difficulties in seeing how this movie really addresses any deep afflictions at all. We do tend NOT to be afflicted by CLICHÉS. Clichés might be symptoms of afflictions however and I tried to see von Trier's film in this way but failed to see what these stereotypical and crude (but oh so aesthetized) images would confront us with. I don't want to say anything about what von Trier himself thinks about women, that is not interesting.

I know von Trier is no stranger to kitsch and over-the-top stuff in general, and that was not my problem with Antichrist. It was just that the kitch stuff (witches, a talking fox, lots of gore) didn't seem to have any purpose.

There were a couple of beautifully shot scenes, but those few moments didn't for sure make the film's end credits dedication to Tarkovsky less a joke than it appeared to be to me. Tarkovsky this wasn't. Pompous B-movie was what I thought of it. It wasn't so much that I was outraged by the violence in von Trier's film, but the whole thing seemed rather pointless to me as I couldn't make out what von Trier was trying to say with it.