Antichrist

City Paper Grade: B+

by Sam Adams

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B+ ]

CHARLOTTE'S WEB: Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance is startlingly intense in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Born out of Lars von Trier's bout with clinical depression (which, to judge from recent interviews, he's not quite over), this harrowing two-hander is an ordeal by design.

After therapist Willem Dafoe and academic Charlotte Gainsbourg lose their son in a coitus-related accident, they face their grief by retreating to a secluded cabin they call "Eden," at which point the movie explodes into a cross between Don't Look Now and The Evil Dead. Dafoe's unnamed character attacks his wife's crippling anguish with logic and jargon, settling on a complete immersion in her fears as the best chance for a cure. But Gainsbourg's illness is more profound, and more primal, than he imagines.

Unbeknownst to him — whether due to lack of interest on his part or secrecy on hers is left unclear — his wife's abandoned thesis centers on the theme of gynocide, the systematic persecution of women in the form of witch hunts and the like. Gainsbourg's guilt, and its connection with her own sexual gratification, blossoms into a savage psychosis directed at the source of that pleasure. To say more would spoil the movie's shocks, which are a legitimate part of its effectiveness. In a sense, Antichrist is yet another movie in which Trier beats up on a female protagonist, but to dismiss him as a gynophobe neglects the movie's psychodramatic draw. It's an embodiment of fears, not an endorsement of them.

Gainsbourg's startlingly intense and unreserved performance has too much raw-nerve energy to be condensed to a castrating archetype; what's frightening is not the woman, but the sickness inside her (or, if you like, visited upon her). With its smeared lenses and Stygian blotches (beautifully captured by digital maestro Anthony Dod Mantle), the movie is Trier's most visually elaborate since the dawn of Dogme, adding a seductive pull to the subject's violent push. Like most of Trier's movies, Antichrist wavers between inspired and insufferable, but it's too nervy to simply dismiss.