Left Field Cinema

When I watched Antichrist, I cleared my mind of all things Lars Von Trier, I tried to get rid of all my prejudices for the films creator, but despite my best efforts the film was still a dog. I thought I’d either love it or hate it, but oddly it’s a film I’m fairly indifferent to.

First off, let me say that this the best Lars von Treir film I’ve ever seen, it has some superb assets in its formal arsenal, great performances from the central couple, brilliant uneasy sound design, unusual editing and some interesting photography are chief amongst it’s successes as well as some genuinely creepy moments (like the boy having his shoes on the wrong way around). From a technical and performance point of view it is hard to fault the film (although I still don’t like the look of HD Video on the big screen and the prologue and epilogue were a tad too stylised for my tastes and seemed out of sorts with the rest of the film, in fact the epilogue could have been cut with no damage to the film).

But where there are elements that impress, the overwhelming feeling I left the cinema with was one of total indifference. There are three films here, (1) is a powerful meditation on grief and traumatic psyches (2) is a slasher film where a couple go to the woods and things get messy (3) is a metaphysical and symbolic examination of the horrors of the human heart. Any one of these films done by themselves (and with a better script) would have been a very interesting film to watch, but von Trier rams them altogether and the resulting film is frankly a huge mess. The horror seems out of place, unrealistic and ridiculously explicit, it seems like a sub-par torture-porn flick stuffed in at the end of a serious film with serious performances. The whole film is both pompous and pretentious and simply doesn’t work. As I say, any one of these three films done by a purer director and by themselves would have been great, which is a shame really as I can see the potential in all of them.

Away from the fundamentals, there are several smaller points which irritated me and could have been done better. Most of the dialogue is on-the-nose and although I’m not versed intimately in psychology, some of the techniques used and principles exhausted seemed somewhat idiotic. The violence is grizzly but is also so explicit that it loses most of its impact, this is one area where subtly can be used very well, if I compare the violence in this film to say the teeth plucking/tongue cutting scenes in Oldboy and the difference is clear. In Oldboy we never see the violence too explicitly, we hear screams and we see what is about to happen, but not the act itself. Park Chan Wook understands that what the mind can imagine is far more powerful than what he can put on screen, von Trier clearly does not.

Willem Defoe’s character seems to be the most sexually charged individual in cinema history, even when he’s being attacked, having a lump of wood cracked in his groin or a glass smashed over his head he can still get an erection a few seconds later! Good for him, not so good for believability.

Other parts of the film just didn’t work, Defoe’s character clearly starts going bonkers in the second act but then this thread is resolutely abandoned for no reason; other developments go nowhere (like the shoes on the wrong way scenes). The talking Fox had most of the cinema audience laughing, and the final dedication to Tarkovsky made me laugh out loud, as Sight and Sound said the dedication is like a final gob of spit landing in your eye.

Ultimately the film postures as movie with something to say, but makes no statement, its grizzly violence is clearly there only to shock, stir up controversy and get a bigger audience. I admit my own culpability in this matter as I bought my ticket on the strength of the films trailer, I was conned, like thousands of other viewer, I was conned into watching a superficial mess, the most cynical of films which if it weren’t for the performances would be one of the very worst films of 2009.

Re-reading this review it seems clear that I'm not "indifferent" to the film at all, I really didn't like it and the more I think about it the less I like it... It's a film with a rotten heart.

M.Dawson