Antichrist: Beautifully Demented

by: littlenick

GRADE: A



The opening scene set the tone of the film: a desperate helplessness of human passion. With steamy water splashing over a steamy couple having some steamy sex, beautiful opera music amplifies in the background as their child falls to his tragic death from negligence. Antichrist is truly passionate and delivers it with so much force, using graphic sexual images with in the first 45-seconds of the film. We see Willem Dafoe's penis entering Charlotte Gainsbourg's vagina, with testicle slowly swaying like the pendulum on a clock. No holding back, Lars Von Trier truly shows the emotion and desire of sex as we all dream of it. The music and snow of the scene add to this idealistic dreamlike state. Besides the sex, the scene reflects the opening of Citizen Cane, revealing very much, but not very much that would make any sense until the very end.

Von Trier is known for pushing the limits of film and Antichrist takes the limit and smashes it with a brick, just as Gainsbourg crushes Dafoe's testicles in one scene. Pretty bad right? Well it only increases in intensity from there, she then proceeds to masturbate his penis on camera, resulting in a bloody ejaculation all over her white blouse and oozing down her hand. The bloody batch of sperm ejaculating is like a starting gun at the begininng race. And the gun is off, and intensity surges for the next 30 minutes. You want it too stop, but you cannot prevent it, you must sit and watch the painfulness of a drill going through Dafoe's calf muscle.

And finally exactly like the scene itself, you feel a climax. She lies on the floor pleasuring herself, and then Dafoe erotically rubs her clitoris. Which immediately in the next clip is sliced clean off by a pair of shiny scissors. Her scream haunts the earth. The pain encroaches the audience as much as it pains her.

If genital mutilation was the demented, the beautiful is the cinematography of the rest of the film. Brilliantly shot scenes of the forest, disturbed animals, and breath taking sex. Amazingly artistic film, a film that is truly made as a series of specific pictures to be scene in sequence on screen. Every image and name have so much meaning and biblical references, as the couple stay at their cabin eden. Who is the Antichrist? Well I won't reveal this, thats what the film is for. However, throughout the film it becomes more and more clear, as the blood spills and the pain outweighs the pleasure, we discover the Antichrist.


NOTE: Gainsbourg won the Cannes festival best actress award, for the following performance.