Lots of shock and awe, but not much of a point

Consider that a flashing red warning sign that Lars von Trier's R-rated, high-toned horror film Antichrist packs a wallop when it comes to explicit content. We're talking about sexual content, yes, but we're also talking about the kind of images that are not so much in the domain of the wet dream as they are in the realm of the wake-up-screaming nightmare.

In short, von Trier is in full provocateur mode with a tale of a personal tragedy that compels a contemporary married couple into the kinds of acts that wouldn't be out of place in a medieval torture dungeon.

Unfortunately, as the movie goes on, it appears von Trier is a provocateur without a cause.

In the film's extreme slo-mo prologue, the stage is set when a couple, credited only as "He" and "She" (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are too busy making passionate love in the bathroom to notice their toddler son has escaped his crib and is falling out a high apartment window.

Such is her emotional devastation, she is confined to a hospital for a month. But he, a psychologist, blanches at the sundry medications and treatments prescribed by her doctor and convinces her to overcome her anguish by going off her meds and retreating to "Eden," a rustic cabin in the woods.

He intends to guide her back to a semblance of normal life by making her confront her fears, beginning with her fear of nature, or as she dubs it, "Satan's church."

Turns out isolation isn't such a hot idea, a realization made manifest when he discovers the thesis document she had been working on the previous year, titled "Gynocide," a treatise on the history of violent misogyny. Stashing all her research in an attic, she apparently abandoned the project due to ambivalence as to whether male or female evil is to blame. Her subsequent debilitating attack on her hubby's wedding tackle would seem to imply that, in von Trier's imagination, maybe all those burned witches of the 16th century were asking for it.

Antichrist is a disorienting experience, and at first you might attribute this to von Trier's tendency to warp the natural landscape with photographic trickery and throw in bizarro elements such as a talking fox.

A better explanation might be that the film has much going for it, including gorgeous cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) and totally brave, committed performances by Dafoe and Gainsbourg.

But in the service of what?

The Danish von Trier seems to be taking a page from Swedish master Ingmar Bergman in its religious overtones and its depiction of a bourgeoise marriage degenerating into brutality and chaos (Scenes from a Marriage). Even Antichrist's controversial scene, depicting genital mutilation, has an antecedent in Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

But if Bergman mostly was deemed artsy and abstract in his time, he comes off as accessible as Steven Spielberg compared to von Trier, whose main achievement here is to rally formidable filmmaking talent to the cause of cheap shock.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Antichrist

n Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg

n Cinematheque.

n R

HH1/2 out of HHHHH

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 12, 2010 D4