|
|
| |
 |
| |
| Released: |
2009 |
| |
|
| Genre: |
DRAMA
HORROR
CONTROVERSIAL
|
| |
|
| Origin: |
Denmark/ Germany/ France/ Sweden/ Italy/ Poland |
| |
|
| Colour: |
C |
| |
|
| Length: |
109 |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
PRO Reviews
|
|
|
| I am the greatest director in the world. |
|
|
| (Lars von Trier, in a Cannes press conference following the booing of Antichrist in May 2009) |
|
| It's one good-looking, publicity-grabbing provocation, with an overlay of pseudo-Christian allegory thrown in to deflect a reasonable person's accusations of misogyny. |
|
| (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly) |
|
| What does lift Antichrist into the upper ranks of the director’s work is the hitherto unmatched mastery of craft that he wields here. If von Trier the rhetorician is slightly subdued on this occasion, von Trier the filmmaker has never been more brazenly, exhilaratingly alive. The film’s concluding dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky may have inspired jeers from the Cannes crowd, but the delicacy and occasionally oppressive immaculateness of its imagery sustains the connection; indeed, several sequences, most notably an early, milkily-lit dream-walk through the woods in a character’s mind, seem indebted to the Russian filmmaker’s balletic visual sensibility. |
|
| (Guy Lodge, incontention.com) |
|
| This is cinema at its most extreme and mind-boggling, akin to Valerie Solanas from the Society for Cutting Up Men directing Don't Look Now. Shot in silvery monochromes and textured earth-colours, and full of bewitching ultra slo-mos, it looks brilliant. The performances are brave and truthful. What is it about? Something to do with modern-day therapy as a doomed attempt to deal with the elemental forces that both divide and compel men and women? I'm not sure. I found it upsetting, absurd, totally deranged. But no more obscene than the medieval tracts that inspired it. Antichrist is a film about pain that is itself in pain. |
|
| (Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph, at the Cannes Film Festival) |
|
| Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect. |
|
| (Damon Wise, Empire) |
|
|
| Twisted, depraved and troubling... and also utterly brilliant. |
|
| (David Edwards, Mirror) |
|
| The most shocking film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. |
|
| (Anita Singh, Sunday Telegraph) |
|
| Nothing can prepare you for the experience of Antichrist. Nothing. |
|
| (John Carr, Sky Movies) |
|
| A funhouse of terrors that rattles the bones and fizzes the blood. |
|
| (Xan Brooks, Observer) |
|
| Lars von Trier. Not a name immediately associated with dark horror and extreme violence, but rather with European independent cinema and the Dogme ’95 movement. With his latest film, Antichrist, Trier has stayed away from the shaky camera, gotten himself a crew and two of the best actors of their generation, and made the most explicit, terrifying and surreal film of the last 10 years, steeped in horrific symbolism and unremitting brutality. I loved it. |
|
| (Simon Read, Quiet Earth) |
|
| Something truly horrible, made even more disturbing for seeming to emerge from a deep-rooted personal grievance with the world. It’s a true event movie, and as God and the Devil - and Lars himself, who may be a little of both - know very well, there really haven’t been enough of those around of late. |
|
| (Mike McCahill, Sunday Telegraph) |
|
| Most original horror movie of the year. |
|
| (Kim Newan, Empire) |
|
| Terrifying. |
|
| (Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph) |
|
|
|
|
, He - Willem Dafoe 
