'Antichrist': Grueling, even as Von Trier goes

In all his best known works -- from "Breaking the Waves" (1996) through "Dancer in the Dark" (2000), "Dogville" (2003) and "Manderlay" (2005) -- Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has repeated the the same template: He gives us an appealing female protagonist . . . and then dumps her in a story designed to torment, humiliate and even kill her. Not surprisingly, this has earned him a bit of a reputation as a misogynist. In his new "Antichrist," he addresses this criticism head-on -- by having the lead woman discuss historical misogyny while he torments her.

Through a series of coincidences -- or because there's something mystical in the air -- "Antichrist" has striking connections to several other current releases. As in "Paranormal Activity," the central story plays out as Foolishly Rational Man versus Woman in Touch With Something Deeper. As in "Couples Retreat," these characters try to rehabilitate their marriage by traveling to a remote locale named Eden. As in "Where the Wild Things Are," they discover sentient beasts who actually speak to them. Where the latter film's Max cries, "Let the rumpus begin!" Von Trier (in a title card) tells us "Chaos reigns!"

But most of all, the story of "Antichrist" resembles Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" (1973) -- one of the greatest horror movies ever made. During the precredit sequence, the nameless couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are engaged in sex -- with a few surprisingly explicit shots -- while we see their 4-year-old toddle toward an open window. The suspense is nearly intolerable, and Von Trier stretches it out in gorgeous black-and-white slow motion, with an ethereal Handel aria -- one of the very few bits of music in the film -- on the soundtrack.

The husband -- a clinical psychologist with no apparent sense of ethical guidelines -- decides to take charge of treating his wife's ensuing depression, forcing her to abandon her doctor's supervision, toss away her drugs and submit to his brand of therapy. Soon they have traipsed off to their cabin in Eden, where she spent the previous summer with their son, to "confront her fears." The pair descend into violent madness, with the final third as grueling as anything the director has done, and a good deal more explicit, to boot. (Obligatory warning: I'm fairly accustomed to "extreme cinema," but I had to cover my eyes two or three times, as the explicitness moved beyond "Misery" and into "Audition" territory.)

Von Trier's previous sorties into torturing the audience may or may not have an aesthetic justification, but they were carefully structured around issues of faith, God, nihilism and the human condition. This time around, however, the thrust is either incoherent or so complex as to require a sharper mind than my own. Chaos reigns, indeed.

While the apparent thematic incoherence is frustrating, the movie does suggest an aesthetic return to a few of the best aspects of his early work, when he made his mark on the festival circuit with "The Element of Crime" (1984) and "Zentropa" (a.k.a. "Europa," 1991). In those days, Von Trier preferred to seduce -- sometimes literally hypnotize -- rather than brutalize: Every image was beautifully composed, every shot painstakingly worked out, the spirit of Orson Welles looming in the background. He then did a 180, embracing handheld camera and the Dogma ethic he helped create. There are sequences in "Antichrist," most obviously the opening, that remind us of those earlier works, full of the artfulness and control that he used to exercise so brilliantly.

--Andy Klein

Photo credit: IFC Films