Antichrist 2009 Review: Smash Hit or Just Sad?

Premise:
William Defoe plays a psychotherapist who loses his son when he falls out of a window while Defoe and his wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg are making love in the next room. Gainsbourg is emotionally crushed by the death and Defoe decides to take her treatment on himself and brings her to an isolated cabin for rest and therapy. The longer that the couple stay in the cabin the farther Gainsbourg´s grasp of reality slips away and the stranger the surrounding forest seems to get. Defoe is finally forced to  kill his wife after she attacks him several times. Through out Defoe has contact with the “Three Beggers”, a deer that he saw in mid miscarraige, a self-disembowling fox who seems to mumble “Chaos reins” and a crow that Defoe finds buried alive.

What´s Good:
This is a typical Lars von Trier offering. Plenty of violence, blood and weird creatures . If you liked movies like “The Secret Window”, or the “The Passion Christ”, AntiChrist 2009 combines the psychological elements of the first while at the same time adding the drama and violence the second. Defoe is absolutely great, as usual able to pull meaning out of even the simplist scene and Gainsbourg supports her role very well.

A couple lose their young son when he falls out the window while they have sex in the other room. The mother’s grief consigns her to hospital, but her therapist husband brings her home intent on treating her depression himself. To confront her fears they go to stay at their remote cabin in the woods, “Eden”, where something untold happened the previous summer. Told in four chapters with a prologue and epilogue, the film details acts of lustful cruelty as the man and woman unfold the darker side of nature outside and within. Lars von Trier bookends the story with both a prolog and an epilog making  the whole thing much more understandable.

What´s Bad:
There is far too much symbolism in the film, and the violence and brutality make it difficult to sort out exactly what´s happening from one minute to the next. You might well leave the theater not much more enlightened about the story than when  you went in. Lars von Trier is know for going to extremes in his films and this is no exception.

Overall:
This is a fun film to watch if you are a psychology buff or if you just like to watch a man haul around a milestone and get his testicles crusted. It is a fun movie to watch. This movie is worth watching twice and, if you do, you will get a much better idea of what´s going on.

Antichrist Movies

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