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| Released: |
2009 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
HORROR
CONTROVERSIAL
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| Origin: |
Denmark/ Germany/ France/ Sweden/ Italy/ Poland |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
109 |
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ANTI Reviews
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| He's a smug psychotherapist; she's borderline psychotic, consumed with guilt. Rather than finding solace, they wind up destroying each other, along with a chunk of von Trier's reputation... Fearsomely ambitious, the movie resembles Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, in its nightmare conjugal claustrophobia, and Kubrick's The Shining, in its foredoomed attempt to be the scariest movie ever made. Literal hallucinations seem clumsy and gratuitous; von Trier not only terrorizes the audience with the death of a child and the spectacle of mental disintegration, but with torture, castration, extreme self-mutilation, and supernatural bad vibes. |
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| (J. Hoberman, Village Voice) |
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| After a couple’s young son falls to his death while they are engaged in passionate lovemaking, their world spirals into the stuff of nightmares and demons. With the warped genius of Lars von Trier propelling them to depths of depravity, the shock factor is likely to dissuade even the most hardened of spirits from partaking. What any ratings board will make of it is anyone’s guess, but audiences at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival came away reeling with disgust, disbelief and very few affirmative views. Its prospects have to be extremely limited, even for the arthouse crowd and followers of the demonic Dane. |
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| (Richard Mowe, Box Office) |
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| Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images that might have impressed even Hieronymus Bosch, as the director pursues personal demons of sexual, religious and esoteric bodily harm, as well as feelings about women that must be a comfort to those closest to him. Traveling deep into NC-17 territory, this may prove a great date movie for pain-is-pleasure couples. Otherwise, most of the director's usual fans will find this outing risible, off-putting or both - derisive hoots were much in evidence during and after the Cannes press screening - while the artiness quotient is far too high for mainstream-gore groupies... End credits dedication to the late Andrei Tarkovsky was greeted by laughs and catcalls in Cannes. |
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| (Todd McCarthy, Variety) |
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| Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog. ("Nature is Satan's church," the wife utters apocalyptically at one point.) This focus on nature subsequently gets conflated with human nature and finally with female nature, where von Trier's careerlong misogyny comes into fullest bloom. In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged. |
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| (Peter Brunette, Hollywood Reporter) |
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| The whole thing stubbornly remains as obscure and hermetic as the nightmare of a psychotic. Frightening? Disturbing? Irritating? None of that. Just disappointing and disturbing. The film suffers from its sufficiency, arrogance and selfishness. Too deeply personal to not leave the audience at the door, on the contrary, Antichrist turns its back and refuses access to its mysteries while being draped in a dishonest provocative approach. And even at that level, it fails. If the film is the fruit of the author's serious depression, one worries about his mental health and wishes for his speedy recovery. He should take his time, and above all, get help! |
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| (Moland Fengkov, Plume Noire) |
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| The film, divided into four chapters sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue, doesn’t work as a horror film — too much suspension of disbelief and of rationality required — doesn’t work as the unraveling of a relation — we can’t bring ourselves to care about this odd couple, the husband a moronic therapist encouraging his wife to get over the awful death of her baby by taking deep breaths and counting to five — doesn’t work as a history lesson, even in the chapter glibly titled “gynocide,” and doesn’t work as a Hyeronimus Bosch-inspired vision of hell in the nature around us and within us. Most unforgivably, the first part is rather boring and the second part rather grotesque. |
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| (Saideh Pakravan, Screen Comment) |
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| Veteran provocateur Lars von Trier must have been feeling taken for granted, because he goes all out for our attention in baroque horror essay Antichrist. The film could be described as a shocker in more ways than one, and was greeted with both laughter and booing at its Cannes competition press. This bizarre, increasingly hysterical melodrama for two is ostensibly von Trier’s first crack at genre horror, but his nods to convention really serve an attempt to pursue the gender-war theme further than even the director’s avowed influence Strindberg... Von Trier has stated that Antichrist was a form of therapy for him, following a long period of depression. You can imagine that its making was cathartic for him, and no doubt for the actors, who go at their performances full tilt - raw and often discomforting nudity included. The eventual extremity of the acting is very much part of the overall conception, suggesting that – despite flamboyantly cinematic finish – Antichrist is ultimately as rooted in stage drama as the director’s studio-shot Dogville and Manderlay. Von Trier deserves credit for audacity, not least in making a genuine two-hander: apart from the couple’s sporadically glimpsed child, Gainsbourg and Defoe are the only players, other humans appearing with faces digitally blurred. Dod Mantle’s elegant DV photography, using RED and Phantom cameras, makes for visual distinction, both in the stylised sequences and in the straighter chamber-drama sequences. But you can’t help wondering why a director this sophisticated would want to put his audience through the mill quite so crudely. After a brief, weird-out epilogue, we come out feeling that we have learned very little – other than that it’s a good idea to hide the toolbox when having a domestic tiff. |
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| (Jonathan Romney, Screen International) |
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| One aspect of von Trier is becoming clear: his attitude to women, or specifically the female characters he creates in his films, is bizarre, bordering on creepy. The Great Dane, we may deduce, seems to get a kick out of putting his screen women in jeopardy or in violent situations. |
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| (David Gritten, Daily Telegraph) |
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| Watching this film was like having bad sex with someone you loathe – a hideous combination of sheer boredom and disgust. I hated it, and I hate the director for making it. So, Von Trier was depressed a while back, had nightmares and decided to write the script of this atrocity as a form of therapy. Couldn't he have kept it to himself? No doubt this monstrous creation will be inflicted on film studies students in years to come. Their tutors will ask them what it "means", prompting some to look at signifiers and symbolism of female sexuality as punishment, and of the torture-porn genre as a site of male resistance to female emancipation... If there is any justice in the world, this film would sink into oblivion. Aside from the risible script and potty plot, we have rubbish acting. Having previously loved Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I will now cross the street to avoid watching anything with them in. Apparently, both read the script and couldn't wait to be in it. That makes them almost as bad as Von Trier. If you see this film you will be putting your money into something which deserves to bomb – and give a grain of validity to the sickest general release in the history of cinema. |
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| (Julie Bindel, Guardian) |
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| It is bad, very, very bad. It’s not bad because it contains some of the nastiest scenes I have ever seen — though it does. It’s bad because mere self-indulgence is not art. A hopeless ragbag of pointlessly pretty shots, hack metaphors, misogyny, undergraduate portentousness and plagiarised cinematography, it left me, by the closing scene, angry. The nastiness, meanwhile, is so nasty that it leaves one wondering what the British Board of Film Classi fication (BBFC) thinks it is for. It may not be necessary — I’m agnostic about this — but, as it is there, how come Antichrist got an 18 certificate uncut? |
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| (Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times) |
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| I have never had the urge to walk out of a film, no matter how bored I am or how terrible it appears to be. For the first time in my life Antichrist summoned this unwanted desire to the forefront of my mind but I remained in my seat (out of shock more than anything else)... There seems to be obscene violence for the sake of obscene violence... The cinematography is, in a few places, stunning but this does not make up for what is an absolutely abhorrent piece of cinema and, other than cult fame, I cannot even comprehend why Dafoe and Gainsbourg would want to be part of it. |
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| (Dan Higgins, Pure Movies) |
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| Utterly pompous, stilted and boring... Shock is the only possible attraction because the rest of the film is nonsense. |
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| (Jason Solomons, Observer) |
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| It plays like Strindberg adapted by Eli Roth. It is, as such, too esoteric to satisfy the gorno crowd, too icky to engage anyone else. Divided into chapters (Grief, Despair, other such nonsense), Antichrist first serves up a preposterous black-and-white prologue shot in super slow-mo: a toddler tumbling to his death while the parents (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, credited as He and She) make beautiful love. Replete with a hardcore penetration shot. The couple then retreat to a cabin in the woods, where He – a therapist – attacks with psychobabble, and She – a nutjob – retaliates by drilling a hole through his leg. “Chaos reigns,” growls a disembowelled fox, and he’s not far wrong... OK, so it’s possible that Antichrist is actually this notorious prankster’s most sincere film to date, that it’s a profound, personal meditation on Original Sin and a bold attempt to reclaim the art film. But it’s also possible – nay, probable – that Lars is taking the piss. Whatever his motive, he wants viewers to be outraged, enraged, anything but disengaged, and to give Antichrist any rating other than one star or five stars would be to thwart his sterling efforts. So here’s the one star, delivered with affection and yes, a fair amount of anger. It’s exactly what he would have wanted. |
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| (Jamie Graham, Total Film) |
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| Lars von Trier, we get it. You really, really don’t like women. The Danish arch-provocateur who challenged the movie world to get back to basics with the Dogme movement, and famously fell out with Bjork in the Palme d’Or-winning Dancer In The Dark, returns from a creative wilderness period resulting from a bout of chronic depression. He has described Antichrist, a melodramatic psychological horror film, as being a therapeutic and deeply personal piece of work – which suggests that there is a special circle of hell which exists solely in Lars von Trier’s head.... If the film were not so cold and emotionally uninvolving then the arty torture porn element might be more upsetting. But given how desperate to shock the film is, it’s surprising that long swathes of it are so turgidly dull. Von Trier cites Strindberg as a major influence and it’s true that the two characters feel less like a husband and wife than a pair of strangers in a rather stale and dated play. And the movie descends into the ridiculous with a zombie crow and a disembowelled fox in undergrowth which speaks the words, “Chaos reigns”. It’s difficult to imagine where von Trier will go next in his career. A graphic onscreen clitorectomy is a tough act to follow. And I can’t imagine that actresses will be queuing up to work with him after this. |
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| (Wendy Ide, Times) |
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| A crazy, hysterical work that alienates the audience with its infantile shock tactics and tedious transgressions. |
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| (Cosmo Landesman, Sunday Times) |
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| What lingers in the memory is the violence, the deep-rooted misogyny and the sheer, unrelenting nastiness of the whole endeavour. |
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| (Matthew Bond, Mail on Sunday) |
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, He - Willem Dafoe 
