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Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe

A grieving couple retreat to 'Eden', their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...( read more  read more... ).

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58% liked it

10,924 ratings

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49% liked it

137 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 44 min.

Directed by: Lars von Trier

Release Date: October 23, 2009

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Flixster Reviews (2,069)

  • 366weirdmovies
    January 19, 2010
    366weirdmovies
    After the death of their only child, a therapist takes his grieving and anxiety-ridden wife to a retreat in the woods to face her irrational fears; when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad. Controversial, unnecessarily graphic shock scenes take the...( read more) focus away from what is otherwise a sublimely creepy, mysterious and often beautiful mood piece about guilt and loss.
  • stopitgoaway
    December 23, 2009
    stopitgoaway
    Prologue: Whilst a husband and wife have sex at home, their toddler climbs out a window and falls to his death. In the film, the husband is a therapist and is known simply as He. Similarly, the wife is a researcher into the history of witchcraft and is known simply as She. Note: ...( read more)He is played by Willem Dafoe, who famously portrayed Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ".

    Chapter one (Grief): She collapses at her child's funeral and is hospitalised. He takes over her treatment, believing that He can cure her with the miracles of Science. His theory is that she must re-live her deepest fears. She says she associates fear with Eden, a cabin in the woods where she spent the previous summer trying to finish her dissertation on "Gynocide" (the killing of women). They travel to Eden (the Biblical cradle of mankind) and start hiking through the woods. He sees a deer whose stillborn fawn is still partly contained in its womb. At this stage, Mother and Child, Nature and Birth, are still intertwined in an uneasy harmony.

    Chapter two (Pain): He directs her in therapeutic exercises. "I understood that everything that used to be beautiful about Eden was perhaps hideous," she says. "Now I could hear what I couldn't hear before, the cry of all things that are going to die." Out walking, He sees a wounded fox which speaks: "chaos reigns."

    Chapter three (Despair): He confronts her with an autopsy report and explains that their son's feet were deformed because she forced the kid to wear his shoes on the wrong feet. Why was she trying to harm the kid? She knocks her husband unconscious, batters his genitals, masturbates him, and bolts a lathe wheel onto his leg. He manages to crawl into a foxhole where he finds an injured bird. It is unable to fly, he is unable to walk, both creatures bound to the land. Hands reach out from the Earth, man and nature re-embrace.

    Chapter four (The Three Beggars): It is revealed that she was watching their son as he climbed up to the window. She let the kid die. She mutilates her own genitals with scissors. Her scream alerts the deer, fox, and bird, which come to the cabin. Seeing Him about to extract the wheel, she stabs him. He fights back, strangles her, and burns her corpse on a pyre. A modern man of science becomes a medieval witch hunter.

    Epilogue: He limps away from Eden. Human bodies litter the landscape. He watches a host of women, their faces smudged, climb up a wooded hillside. The film ends.

    So what we have here is the product of director Lars Von Trier's serious and prolonged depression. The film is his rejection of all religion, a sort of post-depression admittance of both atheism and hopelessness and also a nightmarish desire on Lars Von Trier's part to penalise himself for all the "wrongs" and "persecutions" of Catholicism. The film calls itself anti-Christ because it is completely against Christ, Willem Dafoe becoming a collapsed version of pseudo-science and Christianity who is symbolically castrated and turned over to a now hostile world, the director fetishizing his newfound awareness of the hungry ugliness of nature, vagina, birth, death- the spiralling ugliness and baseness of life - God symbolically sodomizing the holy child back out of Mary whilst faceless women are resurrected from the very bowels of the Earth.

    Everything is now wrong and we are already in hell. Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting and indifferent monster it always was. Human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything because they are nature embodied, able to create, bound to the cosmic cycles of menstruation, pregnancy and birth. Discovering this leads the wife to self hatred, self-mutilation and infanticide. Destroy the penis and the vagina and end the spread of Satan's church.

    The film is graphic, but more so for the paradoxes it raises. Men find it hard to reconcile the comforting warmth of the vagina with the monstrosity it becomes at birth within sanitised hospital surroundings. Menstration is itself now ambiguous, the regular heavy flow of blood stymied by a world of plastic bags, air fresheners and pre-cooked meat. Female nature, like all modern nature, is experienced in a bizarre, almost entirely individualised way. Biology, sex, defecation, in their raw and visceral states, have receded back into the realm of the private and the professionally managed. Eyes are shut. Doors are closed.

    When the couple are later kept awake by acorns falling on the roof of the cabin, She tells Him that it takes a hundred years for an oak to reproduce itself just once. The tragedy of the only child dying is the fear of the modern age. Less than a century ago, over-investment in any given child would potentially be a massive waste of time - far better to churn them out and hope that some survive. Nature: brutally pragmatic.

    Antichrist is not, however, straightforwardly an anti-Christian film. It is a heretical film in the Gnostic non-tradition. There is no hope, no salvation, no righting of order, a fact which brought about a profound state Antonioni-like depression in Lars Von Trier. But Despair, Grief and Pain (the 3 encountered animals), as Dafoe's character points out, don't even exist. There is no separating the natural from the unnatural, right from wrong, life from death.

    An X-rated Woody Allen film, director Lars Von Trier failing to produce a new mythography of despair. He serves up "Blair Witch Project" with a sprinkling of Herzog, Antonioni and Dreyer, but fails to film Nature in a way that makes it seem truly bleak and oppressive. Of course the scenes of mutilation and have a visceral power, but this is cheaply achieved.

    Worth two viewings.
  • her69eyes
    November 3, 2009
    her69eyes
    It didn't take long for Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" to divide audiences. Reports of screenings at Cannes, Toronto, and other international film festivals described situations of people shrieking, fainting, walking out, and booing vociferously. The "genital mutilation" in the fi...( read more)lm's climax has achieved such levels of infamy that it's become impossible to enter the film not knowing what to expect. The question exists, however: is there anything to the film beyond shock value? Considering the fearless performances of the leads and the sumptuous cinematography, I think it's fair to say that "Antichrist" is as beautiful as it is ugly (and, well, it's really ugly).

    The film, divided into six sections (four chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue), begins with a black-and-white hardcore sex sequence. As the lovers, known only as He (Willen Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), are consumed by passion, their only child escapes his crib and tumbles to his death. The horror is the catalyst for what will soon come.

    He, a pompous man with an affinity for psycho-babble, has the idea of retreating to the couple's cabin, Eden, in order to help his wife face her fears. It's not long before we learn that nature is, in fact, Satan's church. In films like "Burden of Dreams" and "Grizzly Man", Werner Herzog articulates that nature is not harmonious but rather chaotic. Von Trier takes that concept to a whole new level.

    I won't go into the graphic description of the events to follow, but I will say this: although I was adequately prepared for the gruesome climax, I was still, quite literally, shaken. The film's pacing and dreamlike atmosphere draw you closer and closer in - when the violence finally unfolds, your only defense is to shake, sweat, and clutch your face in terror. Try as you might, you won't dare look away.

    The film is unabashedly pretentious, about as subtle as a block of wood to the testicles, but you lose yourself to it. Regardless of how one may respond to the last twenty minutes of the film, the first hour or so is as beautifully shot and well-acted as anything released in the past few years. Von Trier dedicates the work to Tarkovsky, and although he doesn't quite achieve that level of utter hypnosis, he comes about as close as any film has this decade.

    "Antichrist" is as shocking as any film i've ever seen, but beyond that it's such a compelling work that it's impossible to dismiss as torture porn. Von Trier's message is hateful, his gore a cruel exploitation of the audience, and yet he has still managed to create a singular work in film history. Whether you like it or not, "Antichrist" is a film you'll never forget. In a time where nearly every new release leaves audiences indifferent, von Trier has given us a welcome shock to the very foundation of cinema.
  • johnd62
    October 26, 2009
    johnd62
    I guess I should note that this is not as much as a review as this is a film that I'll honestly admit that you'll either love it or hate it. Sadly I'm in the absolutely hate it with a burning passion. While some will find it insightful and poetic, though sadly for a film that wor...( read more)ks to push buttons, "Antichrist" suffers from trying way too hard and being simply boring. While I wouldn't call myself a fan of director Lars von Trier, I always appreciated his attempts to take risks but here he throws everything you could possible imagine, where you start to figure out that this dude is no more guilty of reusing ideas then Michael f*cking Bay!
    "Antichrist" also has Bay's understanding of feminist theories. As lovely and talented as Charlotte Gainsbourg is, she is not as much giving a performance as she is a tool for von Trier to get his hatred of women out there. When you consider the fact that Dafoe is perfectly okay and rational, take Gainsbourg off the pills for a couple of hours and all sorts of crazy stuff happens. (Read anything about the film and you'll know what I'm taking about.)
    Now I'll admit that this movie has it strong points. The camera work by Anthony Don Mantle is stunning and as much as I dislike the film, I have to admit that its well made and there were one or two moments that the film is genuinely horrific art.
    Simply there's just not enough of this, a beautiful but ugly and cold hearted film. These flaws could be forgiven had "Antichrist" been more then a shallow and sexist bit of dull self-indulgence but its not. Before I can in full on rant mode, its polarizing film so I can look past my own bias and admit its worth a rental for that reason. Though if you can see anything in the film that I missed, I'll gladly listen. Right now though I stand by my review 100%.
  • ceWEBrity
    October 25, 2009
    ceWEBrity
    It feels pointless to even review Antichrist. I watched this with three other people, my cinematically like-minded boyfriend and two of my best friends, and they all loathed it; I was the film's sole champion. I think that watching it is such a massively personal experience for m...( read more)ost people, and that what you get out of it will stem exactly from what you look for in a film. This much can be inferred from the radically divisive critical and public opinion.

    I will be the first to admit that the film is far from perfect. It is, in fact, a chaotic mess of inchoate ideas and half-realized themes, buoyed by a remarkable aesthetic and two infinitely brave performances. As a stand-alone film, its worth is dubious and questionable, but as an essay in to the rollercoaster auteurial procession of Lars von Trier, it is profoundly more telling. Every major criticism he has garnered through the course of his forty-year career, from his alleged misogyny to his dispassionate narratives to his seemingly inappropriate stylistic choices, are all addressed in full here. Antichrist, first and foremost, trafficks in an unusual theme for a "horror" film - the inextricable link between sex/gender and nature. This theme, though stashed pretty deeply within the plot, is rather simplistic and not really that illuminating in regard to the events that unfold. What is more intriguing is WHY "She" has been brought to feel this way, through some ill-timed fusion of self-loathing, mental illness, and her critical consumption of gynophobic material. Anyway, her eventual dissolution is what has spurred the typical cries of misogyny from the viewing public, and what results is by far the most terrifying harridan to ever grace his filmography. Her hatred for her sex would seem to be a reflection of institutionalized attitudes, or so von Trier goes on to posit, and in that regard we're asked to sympathize with her. She has immersed herself in a very hateful aspect of culture in a time where she is very vulnerable, and perhaps the consequences are misogynistic, but I think of her resultant actions as more of an attack against sexism and patriarchy.

    How does nature figure into it? The theater of operations for this sordid tale is Eden, a cabin surrounded by a lush forest that somehow lies at the heart of Her inexplicable fears. The leap between women and the earth is a short one. I think if von Trier's depiction of nature hadn't been as strong as it is here, the film would have stopped short, but he shades it as something powerful and sinister. The verdant landscapes of Eden are fraught with constant darkness and entanglement, and there is very little sound except for ominous humming and buzzing. The fox, an obvious centerpiece for much of the thematic material here, pretty much brings everything full circle. Women -> nature -> chaos.

    I can't help but feel, though, that even if the film doesn't fully realize its potential, it is still the most interesting thing to have come out this year. Even though my friends hated it, we still had an hour-long debate about it immediately after watching, followed by even more discussion the day after. Perhaps this is provocation for the sake of it, but it is loaned meaning through its source. I'm not sure if this film would have been any more powerful coming from a different and less storied director, but it is what it is, and I for one think it is absolutely fantastic. It's going to offend some people, of course, especially in its last half hour (which I actually think is where the movie loses some steam, believe it or not). Without a doubt, however, I think it's going to inspire just as many. I cannot call this either an endorsement or a warning, because I recognize that this movie may well have resonated with me for entirely personal reasons only. I do think that, even for its incompleteness and its occasional repetition, it is definitely the highlight of 2009 in terms of challenging cinema.
  • Arianeta
    February 9, 2010
    Arianeta
    Antichrist is a magnificent film. I don?t know how but it moved me in a lot ways than the usual movie!!! This film is much more an art piece and makes me feel things that I never thought a movie would ever make me feel. Lars Von Tirer has always attempted to go beyond the limits ...( read more)of what could be shown in a movie and in Antichrist he succeeds. Yes I agree that sometimes it?s hard to watch but the atmosphere in the film is very special, and even though not much is happening for the most part of the movie, it still managed to keep me excited for the whole time. The film started with slow motion black and white action with great music in one of the most beautiful and most tragic scenes I have ever seen. There are some brutal and disgusting scenes that maybe have made people feel annoyed but for me, they just made the movie more effective and also von Trier balanced the brutality perfectly with the movie's atmosphere. Cinematography is superb and the acting is also excellent. I love this movie and I recommend it to everyone even those who have a weak heart to see a really strong movie. It's just amazing!
  • dipa89
    February 8, 2010
    dipa89

  • mirabella1996
    February 6, 2010
    mirabella1996
    Really, really, REALLY want to see this!
  • carloserm1000
    February 5, 2010
    carloserm1000
    The story is interesting and is visually very good filmed. It started very well, but then there are a lot of scenes very similar and it turned to be some kind of boring, however there were a couple of good dialogues. The climax is thrilling, but a little too exagerated, and above...( read more) all almost impossible to understand. Good acting by the only two actors, but it was a film with a lot of potential ruined by some things unnecessary. The best of the film: the prologue, because of the music, the images in black and white, the rest is watchable but it doesn't deserve more than a 6 out of 10.
  • electricshocks
    February 3, 2010
    electricshocks
    An understandably provocative film that tries to explore the process of grief as well as self-loathing. Its not as misogynist as people claim but at its heart its about death and sex.

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Critic Reviews

November 12, 2009
Colin Covert, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

To watch the Danish provocateur's new film is to experience unrelenting pain, shading into revulsion, while being inspired by his virtuoso command of the medium and sharp intelligence. full review

October 26, 2009
David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn't even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-'em-up with people chasing each other through the ... full review

October 23, 2009
A.O. Scott, The New York Times

The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull. full review

October 23, 2009
Kurt Loder, MTV

"Antichrist" is a curious mash-up of cutting-edge torture-porn and good old porn-porn that fails on both fronts. full review

October 22, 2009
Claudia Puig, USA Today

The movie immerses itself in the darkest despair imaginable, blending dystopian porn with ghastly horror and graphic violence. But it's all done in a mundane, almost clinical way. full review

October 22, 2009
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Von Trier, who has always been a provocateur, is driven to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Bunuel and Herzog. full review

October 22, 2009
Armond White, The New York Press

The quasi-religious title is misleading provocation; Antichrist is really anti-cinema. full review

October 19, 2009
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

A word to the squeamish: there is no shame in leaving as the tools--and I use the word advisedly--come out. In a way, you will be getting the best of Antichrist, which until now has been a film of awk... full review

October 15, 2009
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Von Trier says he was suffering from severe bouts of depression when he shot the movie. See Antichrist, and you'll know the feeling. full review

July 24, 2009
Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

Antichrist is a fairground ride through the brain of a genius, both nightmarish and apocalyptic. Trier's head is the most dangerous place in modern cinema, its multiple caverns mysteriously structured... full review

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Comments

  • Muktidaya
    September 20, 2009
    Muktidaya
    too much 4 me.. feeling exhausted
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Antichrist Trivia

  • in which movie was the line

    'well i think youre the fuckin antichrist'  Answer »
  • I've hunted the great white whale, been a Nazi scientist, parented the antichrist and fought racial prejudice in the court - who am I?  Answer »
  • The story tells of the childhood of Damien Thorn, who was switched at birth with the murdered child of a wealthy American diplomat. Damien's family is unaware that he is actually the offspring of Satan and destined to become the Antichrist. who plays damien's dad?  Answer »
  • Which actor has played both the Pope and the Antichrist, both in 1981?  Answer »
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