(Spoiler alert)

Whatever you think of Antichrist, you’d be hard pressed to deny that Lars von Trier’s choice of music for the opening scene is a masterly stroke. Soundtracked by the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo, the prologue depicts, in exquisite slow-motion monochrome, the death of a toddler in a fall from his bedroom window as his parents make love in the next room. It is breathtaking: you cannot but be gripped by the gorgeous play of lenses on objects, the rhythm of the editing as the film breathes in time with Handel’s sorrowing score. 

Yet given its harrowing subject matter, there’s something almost indecent about this stylised beauty, which has the airbrushed quality of a Calvin Klein ad. It’s one of a number of scenes that take the film perilously close to kitsch. This is something Handel himself would have understood – the drippingly sensual, pleasure-from-pain aesthetic of the Baroque exulted in such paradoxes. Handel’s aria reminds us that, long before Antichrist, Western art trod a thin line between sublime transcendence and the shabby emotional voyeurism of which von Trier is regularly accused.

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play the unnamed couple struggling to come to terms with their son’s death. She, an academic, is experiencing acute anxiety attacks as part of what her doctor calls “atypical grief”.  Her husband, a therapist, insists on taking charge of her treatment himself. He demands that she face her fears, and asks her to name the place she feels most vulnerable.

Her answer: Eden, an isolated cabin in the woods where she spent the previous summer alone with her little boy, attempting to finish her thesis on ‘Gynocide’ – a study of the witch-hunts used for centuries as a means of exerting patriarchal control over women’s bodies. As the couple cross a bridge to enter the woods, it’s clear that, like the ‘Zone’ in Andre Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, Eden is a state of mind, a psychological landscape they must negotiate if they are to free themselves of their burden of guilt and grief.

As well as referencing Tarkovsky, Antichrist owes an unmistakeable debt to Nick Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which also begins with the death of a child at home.  Like Roeg, von Trier employs radical visual and aural techniques to evoke the psychological states of his characters: destabilising perspectives, CGI doctoring, eerie off-camera noises and tremulous, misted close-ups. The film is shot with a stunning, dreamlike lucidity by British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, a veteran of Dogme films who recently won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.  Most important of all, Don’t Look Now and Antichrist share the same central theme – the terrifying intrusion of the supernatural into a rationalistic worldview.  Like Donald Sutherland’s character John Baxter, Dafoe desperately attempts to protect his wife from what he insists is a mental imbalance, while shoring up his own belief system against mounting evidence to the contrary.

“Nature is Satan’s church,” says Gainsbourg mid-way into the film, as a relentless rain of acorns ominously pounds the roof of the cabin. From here on in von Trier cranks up the weirdness: lichen grows on Defoe’s hand as he sleeps; the woods themselves seem to seethe with a dread malevolence, until the film begins to resemble an arthouse Evil Dead.  As the therapy sessions continue, we learn that Gainsbourg has begun to internalise the very narrative she set out to critique – namely that women, as vessels of nature, are themselves evil. Then Defoe discovers disturbing evidence of low-level child abuse that is corroborated by the toddler’s autopsy report. It seems that, shut away in the woods that summer with only her child and her research for company, his wife suffered some kind of mental breakdown. 

Yet while it offers abundant explanations for its characters’ behaviour, Antichrist wilfully blurs the line between psychology and the occult.  Gainsbourg’s mental state is increasingly suggestive of possession; we get the feeling she is channelling the pain of her historical ‘sisters’, whose partially submerged bodies litter the forest floor like white roots. When, as the film nears its climax, Dafoe seeks refuge in the woods, nature conspires with her against him. The doe, fox and raven that earlier visited Dafoe in a series of hallucinatory episodes have by now become her ‘familiars’.

The Wild Woman is a familiar (if rather dated) archetype of Feminist discourse, and Gainsbourg’s derangement is like a more extreme version of the protagonist’s meltdown in Margaret Atwood’s 1979 novel Surfacing. But what makes Gainsbourg’s character ‘antichrist’ – at least in her own mind – is not her alliance with nature or the occult, but her culpability in the death of her child. This is civilised society’s ultimate taboo, the worst – and paradoxically most ‘unnatural’ – offence a woman can commit. Her guilt accuses her of prizing her own sexual fulfilment over the safety of her child, so that when she metes out punishment, she targets first her husband’s and then her own genitals. The violence Gainsbourg wreaks is harrowing. As she crushes her husband’s groin and then masturbates him to an unconscious, bloody climax; drills through his calf with a millstone; and performs a self-clitoridectomy with a pair of rusty scissors, her actions approach the demonic. They also speak of a bottomless despair.

To some extent we are invited to see Gainsbourg’s hysterical frenzies of violence as an anguished response to male absence and abandonment.  Dafoe is guilty of both arrogance and detachment in his emotionally distanced and controlling response to his wife’s grief.  He turns her into a patient, when we sense that what she needs most is emotional reassurance, intimacy and love.  Nevertheless, such psychological backgrounding remains hopelessly inadequate to ‘explain’ her behaviour.

Antichrist is probably von Trier’s most personal film. Gripped by clinical depression during production, he has spoken of its completion as a form of therapy. Like its predecessors, Antichrist has been widely accused of misogyny. But von Trier’s latest film is much less vulnerable to this charge than is the ‘emotional pornography’ (Bjork) of Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark.  In these earlier films, von Trier behaves much more like Dafoe: staying at a distance, manipulating his subjects from behind the camera with a cold-eyed clarity. In the terrible intimacy of Antichrist, there is no hiding place for a voyeur director.  In fact, Gainsbourg has said that while making the film she felt strongly that she was von Trier.

But to understand a film like Antichrist, we need to consider it in the context of von Trier’s wider preoccupations.  Like French novelist Michel Houellebecq – another enfant terrible of his genre – von Trier is in revolt against his own permissive upbringing and the values of his nudist Communist parents. He has a peculiarly Scandinavian sense of the frailty and limitations of rational humanism and social planning. His target is liberalism rather than conservatism, and as far back as The Idiots his films have been subversive attacks on liberal orthodoxy. But where his earlier work – from Breaking The Waves through to Dogville and Manderlay – pivots on the tension between society and the individual, in Antichrist we have merely man and woman, the original social unit.

A refutation of the hippy concept of nature as a benign force, von Trier’s Eden is a fallen kingdom where chaos reigns. Defoe’s clinical training blinds him to the unpredictable currents pulsing under the surface of reality. When Dafoe reminds Gainsbourg of the tens of thousands of innocents sent to their deaths in witch hunts engineered by men, her strange answer is: “Sometimes I forget.”  It’s as if the liberal consensus view of history is simply a convenient, comforting narrative with which to fend off more disturbing possibilities.   This is the real nightmare of Antichrist – that the rational constructions on which we rely for a secure view of the world are merely that: flimsy constructs that, once relinquished, leave us face to face with ancient fears and our own destructive impulses.

Antichrist is riddled with ambiguity and paradox. It’s a film which often seems to ask us to believe several contradictory things at once, and to interpret phenomena on multiple levels – as coincidence and symbol; as simultaneously real, psychological and supernatural. There are as many obstacles to interpretation in the film as there are aids to it. As in his earlier work, von Trier refuses to allow the viewer to be a passive recipient of the narrative. Instead, he makes viewers work hard, challenging them to participate in ‘editing’ – or making sense of – the film, and he does this so provocatively that at times it threatens to short-circuit the film itself.  As well as recklessly abusing the director-viewer relationship, von Trier’s films everywhere risk kitsch and ridiculousness. This applies even to the puzzling epilogue of Antichrist, in which Dafoe, living on berries as he makes his way back to civilisation, has a vision of hundreds of women walking uphill out of the valley, in what seems to be a processional of the spirits of Gainsbourg’s ‘sisters’.

It’s no wonder that von Trier’s films produce an ambivalent response in the viewer. He is himself conflicted – one might even view the couple in Antichrist as warring components of his own soul or psyche. Perhaps the epilogue, with its attempt at redemptive, eulogising closure, can be read as von Trier’s attempt to reconcile – to bring peace to – the forces he has unleashed on the screen.