Some while back, the consistently atrocious Ewe Boll made a film called Seed. His self-imposed agenda was to produce a horror film that wasn't any fun. On that level he certainly achieved his objective. He managed to fashion one of the most boring, mindlessly gratuitous, unexcitingly violent, plodding, pointless, meaningless and downright time-wasting movies ever.
Whilst Boll is an errant hack with little or no cinematic skill or flair, Lars Von Trier is considered an "artist." He too has managed to craft a horror flick that isn't any fun. Now, before anyone starts yelling "it's not a horror flick" I'm going to tell you why it is.
The plot cribs from some notable past masters of the genre - Dead Calm (1989), Don't Look Now (1973), Long Weekend (1978, 2008), to name but three. Traumatised couple decant to an alien environment to try and rebuild their lives following tragedy and emotional upheaval. Weird/freaky/disturbing events befall and violence and death ensues. As in Long Weekend, nature becomes a sinister force playing a malevolent role in the narrative that unfolds, and Antichrist even replicates the cries of a "child" in the wilderness moment that distresses the female protagonist in that earlier film. The images of dead and decaying wildlife, prey unto insects, are reproduced also. There are even elements of Friedkin's schlocky The Guardian (1990) submerged in there somewhere.
So we have a standard horror/thriller setup. Next we have gore and torture porn components, framed and presented in no more disturbing ways than in the Eli Roth Hostel movies. Dafoe gets a manual drill-bit through the leg and a circular grind stone attached through the wound.
However, there are certain aspects that set Antichrist apart. It wears artistic pretensions clearly on its sleeve with slo-mo black and white sequences which bookend the movie and are filmed like ultra-crisp and sharp high definition segments from a Bergman feature. Very tasteful. We also get a glimpse of erect man muscle. Wow. Daring.
Dafoe's character, an anti-psychiatry therapist, drawls out the most pretentious sub-Freudian drivel and implements the most laughably inept psychotherapeutic formulations. theories and expositions yet expressed in a movie. Looking further back, the awesome confusion that arose between conversion hysteria and schizophrenia and the misrepresented psychobabble exposition for Norman Bates multiple personality in Hitch's Psycho is a work of deep and accurate psychological insight by comparison. When Dafoe's character reaches the absurd "eureka" moment of substituting levels of fear for the levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs it is, frankly, laughable.
Antichrist is not particularly thrilling or exciting or scary, but then I guess it's not supposed to be. If it were, it would be closer to the type of film it is pretending so hard to be distinct from.
Other main key aspects which are supposed to set it apart from its less arty stable-mates are the much touted "explicit" and shocking graphic sex scenes. Which are, to be honest, nowhere near as graphic in their depiction of masturbation and penetrative sex than the first five minutes of your average adult porno fare.
The real coup-de-gras artistic credential verification moments, however, would be the erect penis ejaculating blood and Charlotte Gainsbourg inflicting severe genital mutilation upon herself with a scissors. I remember Regan self-mutilating with a crucifix in Friedkin's the Exorcist back in 1973 – that depiction lacked the intense visual detail the process is afforded in Antichrist, but the blood, sound effects and context made it a much more chilling affair all round.
Von Trier must be having a laugh. He has taken tried and tested horror movie staples and wrapped them up in absurd psycho-babble, steeped them in controversy and repackaged and resold them as a piece of high art cinema.
So many seem to have fallen for it. The only thing truly shocking about this film, considering the pedigree of some of the stuff the director stole from, is just how boring and meaningless it seems to be. The ending should have given it away – blank-faced children stumbling like sheep through a forest whilst observed by the main character. They're the audience, folks. They're us.
Still, I'll give it 3/10 for Von Trier's dazzling sense of audacity.
Whilst Boll is an errant hack with little or no cinematic skill or flair, Lars Von Trier is considered an "artist." He too has managed to craft a horror flick that isn't any fun. Now, before anyone starts yelling "it's not a horror flick" I'm going to tell you why it is.
The plot cribs from some notable past masters of the genre - Dead Calm (1989), Don't Look Now (1973), Long Weekend (1978, 2008), to name but three. Traumatised couple decant to an alien environment to try and rebuild their lives following tragedy and emotional upheaval. Weird/freaky/disturbing events befall and violence and death ensues. As in Long Weekend, nature becomes a sinister force playing a malevolent role in the narrative that unfolds, and Antichrist even replicates the cries of a "child" in the wilderness moment that distresses the female protagonist in that earlier film. The images of dead and decaying wildlife, prey unto insects, are reproduced also. There are even elements of Friedkin's schlocky The Guardian (1990) submerged in there somewhere.
So we have a standard horror/thriller setup. Next we have gore and torture porn components, framed and presented in no more disturbing ways than in the Eli Roth Hostel movies. Dafoe gets a manual drill-bit through the leg and a circular grind stone attached through the wound.
However, there are certain aspects that set Antichrist apart. It wears artistic pretensions clearly on its sleeve with slo-mo black and white sequences which bookend the movie and are filmed like ultra-crisp and sharp high definition segments from a Bergman feature. Very tasteful. We also get a glimpse of erect man muscle. Wow. Daring.
Dafoe's character, an anti-psychiatry therapist, drawls out the most pretentious sub-Freudian drivel and implements the most laughably inept psychotherapeutic formulations. theories and expositions yet expressed in a movie. Looking further back, the awesome confusion that arose between conversion hysteria and schizophrenia and the misrepresented psychobabble exposition for Norman Bates multiple personality in Hitch's Psycho is a work of deep and accurate psychological insight by comparison. When Dafoe's character reaches the absurd "eureka" moment of substituting levels of fear for the levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs it is, frankly, laughable.
Antichrist is not particularly thrilling or exciting or scary, but then I guess it's not supposed to be. If it were, it would be closer to the type of film it is pretending so hard to be distinct from.
Other main key aspects which are supposed to set it apart from its less arty stable-mates are the much touted "explicit" and shocking graphic sex scenes. Which are, to be honest, nowhere near as graphic in their depiction of masturbation and penetrative sex than the first five minutes of your average adult porno fare.
The real coup-de-gras artistic credential verification moments, however, would be the erect penis ejaculating blood and Charlotte Gainsbourg inflicting severe genital mutilation upon herself with a scissors. I remember Regan self-mutilating with a crucifix in Friedkin's the Exorcist back in 1973 – that depiction lacked the intense visual detail the process is afforded in Antichrist, but the blood, sound effects and context made it a much more chilling affair all round.
Von Trier must be having a laugh. He has taken tried and tested horror movie staples and wrapped them up in absurd psycho-babble, steeped them in controversy and repackaged and resold them as a piece of high art cinema.
So many seem to have fallen for it. The only thing truly shocking about this film, considering the pedigree of some of the stuff the director stole from, is just how boring and meaningless it seems to be. The ending should have given it away – blank-faced children stumbling like sheep through a forest whilst observed by the main character. They're the audience, folks. They're us.
Still, I'll give it 3/10 for Von Trier's dazzling sense of audacity.