Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Antichrist (2009). Written and directed by Lars von Trier, Antichrist tells a story of parental loss, mourning, and despair that result from the tragic death of a child. The two main characters in the film are not specifically named; their distinction in the credits is only by their gender; ‘She’, a researcher into witchcraft and gynocide (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and ‘He’, a cognitive therapist (Willem Dafoe). The film is divided into four chapters — ‘Grief’, ‘Pain (Chaos Reigns)’, ‘Despair (Gynocide)’, and ‘The Three Beggars’ — book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue. Challenging his audience emotionally and psychologically, von Trier's oeuvre has focused predominantly on female characters suffering incredible social duress. In Antichrist, one encounters perhaps von Trier's bleakest vision and his darkest, angriest film to date, where accusations of misogyny were again a source of controversy, born of the black depression into which he had admittedly sunk. The chapter then presents a brief biography of von Trier, which gives a clear picture of von Trier's artistic motivations and offers an insight as to how the director capitalised on numerous factors to bring Antichrist to the screen.

Antichrist: An Analysis

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009). In some respects, Antichrist is a deceptive title, implying a simple reversal of the Christian opposition between good and evil, yet the film should, in part, be understood in a context more complicated than that of Christianity, or even New Age pseudo-paganism. It occupies a unique territory, somewhere between horror film and psychodrama, where themes such as misogyny, maternal ambivalence, madness, and lust permeate a ruptured dreamscape with a sustained and unique oddness. Hence, the world of the film is, in a sense, gothic and fantastic; a mode particularly suited for expressing a heady mix of ‘unconscious desire, repressed energies and antisocial fantasies’. The gothic space is also a sight of seduction, sexual transgression, cruelty, humiliation, and death; themes that are all reworked and recombined in Antichrist's dramatic atmosphere. Ultimately, what makes Antichrist stick with audiences is the potent undertow, the sense of loss, guilt, and despair that pervades the locations and plasters itself across the mother's grieving face.

Abject Excess and the Monstrous Feminine

This chapter explains that at the centre of Antichrist's (2009) thematic agenda is the female character's body, providing the object for her husband's rivalry over its control. Throughout the film, the woman's transgressive sexual appetite produces excitement and feelings of liberation, then harm and guilt, and finally complete psychic chaos and self-destruction. Her body is also seen as the site of potential danger, where female sexuality itself is an assault on the male ego. Certainly, Lars von Trier wants the audience to be shocked and repulsed, but he is also forcing them not only to register the felt intensities of the characters, but also to question why these representations of violence seem to work so effectively to alienate the audience. In this way, Antichrist grafts its disconcerting metaphors of male—female power struggles onto its narrative of excess, in order to interrogate issues such as sexual violence, female emancipation, and the crisis of masculinity.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter looks at the critical reception of Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009). Despite the efforts of some to dismiss the film as a prank, Antichrist is an astonishing film of rage and hopelessness, and its disturbing extremes speak of broad and deeply felt moral, social, and, ultimately, political anxieties. Compared with von Trier's previous films, Antichrist feels like a calculated provocation, begging audiences to question, both intellectually and viscerally, the limits of faith or ethics or whatever it is that makes one draw a line between good and evil. Still, how one sees, understands, and reacts to the film depends to a very large extent on what attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices one brings to it. Antichrist is essentially a film about misogyny. By revealing (via extreme exaggeration) the structure of patriarchal domination, the film critiques the tendency of mainstream films that represent women as needing to be disciplined by a rational male figure. In this respect, Antichrist has a considerable amount of feminist value to offer, and it should be explored as a complex net of sometimes contradictory meanings that expose the representation of the female gender within cinema and the fears connected to it.