Antichrist

 
   My goodness.  Lars von Trier is one talented director.  The inside of his head must be a frightening chamber of darkness.  After seeing Melancholia, I wanted to go back and watch his previous film Antichrist and see what all the fuss was about.  Well, fuss doesn't do this film justice - not even a little bit.  Truthfully, based on what I have heard about it for the past three years, I was expecting a film with less of a narrative structure than the one I saw.  I was expecting an onslaught of visual horror intended solely to shock and disturb.  What I got was a really compelling story and a beautifully shot film (and some psyche-altering horror that lifted me from my inner foundation). 
  Antichrist is the story of a couple whose infant son accidentally falls to his death while they are having graphically explicit sex.  Three stages of suffering follow: grief, pain and despair.  Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as the nameless husband and wife who decide to seek emotional refuge in their remote cabin in the woods.  The husband is a psychiatrist and takes his wife on as his patient as she is bearing the brunt of the trauma and guilt of losing their son.  The film takes a disturbingly von Trierian turn and left me feeling sick to my stomach - and that is intended to be a tremendous compliment to the director.  This film and his most recent work, Melancholia, contain a lot of the same signatures of von Trier: slow motion, high-resolution animation-like dream sequences; vivid use of color, especially green; graphic scenes of nudity and sex; mental illness; and people coping with tragedy.  I liked both films quite a bit, but Antichrist takes a slight edge in a comparison, simply because it is much darker and, unlike the first half of Melancholia, didn't have significant stretches where I sort of lost interest. 
  This movie -- and I know I've written this before -- will literally look like nothing you've ever seen before.  It is difficult, grotesque and scary.  It is also mesmerizing, aesthetic and oblique.  Lars von Trier will challenge you with Antichrist.