antichrist: the darkest fairy tale

*SPOILER ALERT*

Antichrist: (2009. dir: Lars von Trier) Just because a thing is a work of genius doesn't mean you can't hate the bastard who made it. Often we are beguiled by genius. Other times, like right now, we want to say, "Congratulations on your cleverness, asshole," and throw rocks.

They used to say a mere human would turn to stone or die or run mad if he looked on a god manifest in his true form. That came into my mind while the end credits rolled. It's not an easy thing to watch, this movie, so compelling and magnetic, but with moments so dark that I felt like I'd been on the mountain and watched bad gods at war, and that I was lucky to escape intact with a few additional grey hairs.

That said, the most startling thing about Antichrist is its extraordinary beauty. It's shot on a Red camera; Red seems to be behind it every time I find a film beautiful these days. And this particular director, with whom I so heavily associate the dreaded shaky-cam, is the one, it turns out, who can most fully control his addiction to it, using stillness (and, more radically, slowness) to sculpt a film of intoxicating grace and fascination.

It's two films, really: a study of different shapes of grieving when a couple loses their child, and a fairy tale pitting the apollonian yang of the masculine against the yawning, chthonic, lovecraftian dark of the eternal feminine. What emerges from the fray is a thing made of thunder and primal anguish. My first thought, and it scared me, was that he has no fear of anything, von Trier, but on contemplation I decided it's the actors undergoing it who are the heroes of the hour. One hears the stories: performers driven half-mad by working with von Trier, some who sign on to do several films but drop out after the first from nervous exhaustion. As when watching porn, one assumes that as long as they're not bound and gagged they're making adult decisions to do the work. This in mind, I wonder if Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are not superhumans looking fondly back at us from one step further up the evolutionary ladder.

Once the couple ventures far into the woods to face their grieving, the fairy tale comes to life through wonderful elements: animal-helpers emerge to guide the man/boy using darkly awful images, and there is a womb-like crevice opening into the earth beneath an ancient, gnarled tree which becomes a terrible place of destruction and rebirth. Acorns pound the roof of the cabin like the hailstones conjured by witches, a constant reminder of the encroaching threat of the natural (ie: the feminine/satanic).

Its biggest flaw is that its violence, which is some of the most disturbing I've ever seen, arrives too suddenly. It is not without warning, certainly, but it is without a satisfactory build-up. In this respect alone a more traditional Hollywood style might have been useful, in which one cheats a little with just a splash of music here, combined in the editing room with a crafty close-up there, all communicating the darkness building inside the draconian She. Instead, her violence seems small and random from the beginning, and when she at last comes roaring out of the gate at full-bore wicked-witch, we do not feel that sense of deep horror (think Nicholson in the Shining) which emerges from having realized the full extent of the threat just before it breaks. The clues are there in the script (the thing with the shoes, which is very effective), but we don't get close enough to the woman to see her storm brewing. In fact, although we see Dafoe's face up close quite often during the course of the film, Gainsbourg remains an enigma most of the time, reflecting the side of the fence (rational apollonian v chthonic feminine) from which von Trier is watching the story unfold. The rational man is the boy caught in the dark fairy-tale jungle, at the mercy of the wicked witch.

Made by a lesser talent, it would have been insulting. Alright, it's still insulting, but a work of true greatness transcends the temporal human scales of political correctness. I can't recommend this movie, because once these images are inside your head, you'll never shake them out again, so be warned, and use caution before venturing into these woods. Only when you're feeling hardy and ready to approach the dark gods with the necessary humility, then, by all means, watch it, and godspeed to you.