NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: The reign of 'Antichrist'

"Antichrist," screening Oct. 2-3 at the New York Film Festival. For more information click here.

Leave it to Lars Von Trier to stir up some controversy. At this year’s New York Film Festival, the controversial director has delivered his bleakest vision yet: A morbid and hopeless affair named “Antichrist,” in which two characters named He and She head off to Eden to get over the death of their child. Going off her meds – at the behest of her therapist husband – She goes maniacal, lashing out at the dead boy’s father, while also turning an array of brute instruments on herself.

It’s a dark, dark affair – a depth charge of an art-house horror film that has already had festival crowds from Cannes to Toronto lined up to get a peak. But appearing at a Sept. 23 press conference, Von Trier brushed aside all talk of god and the devil to suggest that his film advocated less a conflict of good vs. evil than a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Which is to say: This isn’t a gray tug of war; it’s just pitch-black. “The biblical things, like they come from Eden, I’m sorry for that,” he said. “Normally I’d go through all that out. But I didn’t do that this time….there is no God, that’s how I see it.” Noting that he has owned an antichrist-related book for decades that he’s never opened, Von Trier said the title in part stemmed from having that bound text around. But apparently he does not consider this a story of two grieving parents attempting to bring themselves back from the brink. This is about the long, steady fall into outright desolation. Thanks Lars, you really cheered us up!

He’s the first to admit that this film stemmed from a serious bout of depression, that he worked different as a result because of the fractured psyche that wracked him after the death of his own child. In his New York press conference, he implied that the film had not helped him move beyond his darkest phase, and that he was still suffering as a result. It’s curious that so few early critics have discussed the tone and atmosphere of this film, more intrigued it seems by the overt violence of a drill going through a leg, and various blood springing from sexual organs.

These are horrifying images, yes, but they merely seem to be the climax of a long and steady nightmare, molded very carefully by a master filmmaker. There are tears and screams, but there are also sequences in which characters find it difficult to walk and move, where they seem to be acting outside of their own intentions, disassociated from their own bodies. A man takes his wife off medication, a woman slowly wages a psychological war on his love for her and his dead child. These are vicious acts, not merely a precursor for physical violence. Von Trier says he set out to make a horror film, but obviously something else occurred here. He didn’t refine a bleak script because it resonated with him; he didn’t go for the obvious scares of a horror film because this film’s emotional assaults are more effective in terms of scares, chills and torment. He’s taken the human condition, one of hope and love and family, and twisted it all out of proportion. He’s perverted God’s order, and the very human body. “Antichrist” is a macabre masterpiece, of the most unsettling kind.