Grisly Antichrist Is Thin, Dull

While in the throes of passion, and on the brink of orgasm, a couple's toddler falls out an open window to a grisly death in the opening of Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The film has been making the rounds on the film-festival circuit and concerns female sexuality and its relationship to death. The mother, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, falls into a debilitating grief, and her husband, played by Willem Dafoe, takes over her treatment. Gainsbourg, writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times, “allows herself to be pushed and provoked toward brave and extraordinary feats of acting in a dubious cause.” Genitals are mutilated, but on the upside, von Trier’s “depictions of bodily harm inflicted by homely instruments (pliers, scissors, a fireplace log) are avant-garde enough to startle devotees of the Saw franchise.” The director, who said making this movie helped him overcome a major depression, is known for his avant-garde projects such as Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, which both explore women's limits. But here, writes The New York Times, "The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull."