The Antichrist

It's been several years since I've left a cinema and felt like stopping people on the street to apologize for something.

The last time this happened to me was after watching Pasolini's Salo, a film which convinced me that any kind of hunger or desire has a logical conclusion in extreme cruelty and even fascism. Lars von Trier is also really good at playing with logical extremes. The Antichrist explores two kinds of responses to the challenge of living in the aftermath of an inexpiable crime. The masculine response is rational, ordered, structured, and even cold. The feminine response is disordered, emotional, unstructured, and unpredictable. Both come up short.

The ensuing drama is terrifying, and the acting is convincing--so convincing in fact that it's easy to overlook the thin and annoying plot mechanism of the woman's failed PhD dissertation on medieval misogyny. It's the closest von Trier has ever come to extremely lazy screenwriting, but he can easily be forgiven on account of how much success he attains with his characters.

And I'm uncertain whether the ghoulish talking animals and other unsightly preternatural junk remain below von Trier or if he exalts these elements of schlock horror. Either way it is the disturbing treatment of human problems and our hastily drawn, totally inadequate solutions that makes this a great film.