DANISH film-maker Lars von Trier is often called “controversial” – in fact, he seems to court controversy.
The self-declared “world’s best director”, with his mischievous, even contrary nature, can seem frustratingly opaque to many people.
Some are alienated further by his unwillingness to explain his movies, leaving audiences to make their own interpretations.
Von Trier, remember, is responsible for some of the most powerful, remarkable and – inevitably – most talked about cinema of recent years, from Breaking The Waves and The Idiots to Dancer In The Dark and Dogville.
Whether or not you swallow his “world’s best” line, you might at least be forced to concede that, at this moment in time, Antichrist could ONLY be a von Trier film – part horror movie, part psychological drama, full of classical references and symbolism (some subtle, some sledgehammer). Beautiful and effective at times, grotesque and risible at others.
It’s all there – the controversy, the mischievousness, the deadpan contrariness, the shock moments, the puzzling ideas and images.
What Antichrist ISN’T is a great von Trier film. A huge controversy, yes, after the storm it brewed at Cannes and beyond – but in time it may well be viewed as something of a minor effort in the context of his on-going canon.
And just to stick with the theme of contradiction, it might be worth noting here that the director has called this his “most important” film yet.
If by “most important” he means the one that helped him recover from a crippling bout of artist’s depression, to see him working meaningfully again, then yes, it is “important”.
But, judging the movie itself, rather than much of what has already been said about it, you may well be disappointed – shocked, but disappointed.
It is, though, one of the “must-see” movies of the year for dedicated followers of film – if just to say you have seen it, and seen it all, not flinched at its already notorious scenes of painful violence and self-harm.
At the heart of it are two brave and very watchable performances, from Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as the parents of a child who dies in an opening sequence that intercuts an explicit scene of lovemaking with shots of the boy climbing to and falling out of an open window.
We seem to be heading for Don’t Look Now territory when Dafoe and Gainsbourg, whose character is still struggling to come to terms with her grief and loss, head off to a secluded cabin in the woods.
Here it was that the mother spent time with her child the previous summer, and where she worked on an academic study of the evil that women do, and have done down the ages. A study that also includes the punishments carried out by men on these “evil” women.
Add a real sense of foreboding (probably the film’s most consistent achievement is establishing and sustaining the idea that something bad is going to happen), a talking fox who acts as a prophet of doom and a screaming subtext on the arbitrary life and death struggle that is nature, and von Trier has set the scene for his bloody final act.
Despite containing some uniquely disturbing images, Antichrist often looks spectacular – particularly in the opening monochrome prologue, beautifully shot by Slumdog Millionaire’s British cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle (von Trier, again displaying his contrariness, has said in interview the finished film is “too beautiful overall”, and that certain images should have been “much more trashy”).
Some of the scenes in the woods, and other monochrome sequences, shot in extreme slow motion, also have a real power and beauty.
Von Trier, casting up images from his subconscious, and from deep childhood memories, throws it all at the screen and hopes some of it sticks.
But the “story”, simple as it is, doesn’t work.
In the end, while the calls to censor it, or ban it outright, are well off the mark, Antichrist fails to completely convince – or to live up to the cleverly campaigned self-hype as the “most important” movie by the “world’s best” director.