Word: film
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...almost hallucinatory sense of confusion that pervades Lars Von Trier’s latest feature, the dubiously titled “Antichrist,” in its viewing experience as in its very composition. Already infamous for its disastrous reception at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival, the film seemed destined for a sort of immortality even before it hit worldwide release this month: the immortality of perpetual debate. Outrage circulated over controversy-stoking scenes of castration and genital self-mutilation, misogynist diatribe, and stultifying psychoanalytic pedantry. Hilarity abounded over a woodland fox that inexplicably speaks...
...sure, “Antichrist” is rife with all of these things. Just as sure, the film never provides—nor so much as even suggests—a measure of forward-motion that would constitute a remotely critical synthesis for all the bizarre, absurd, or utterly inane things that manage to find their way into the 100 minutes that comprise it. Instead, Von Trier seems satisfied with a set of auteuristic half-measures intended to flummox or thwart critical impingement. When Willem Dafoe’s unnamed therapist-husband character exclaims toward...
...snow-filled sky to the sound of Händel’s “Rinaldo” is just one of the scenes that impress—if only in passing—in “Antichrist,” and builds credit for the film to develop, if nothing else. But this image of a child falling in space, evocative of the fertile—however unambitious—dynamic of existential dread, is not the one Von Trier adopts for the propulsive force at the heart of the film. Instead, it is the satisfied, almost...
...first half of the film is essentially a horror film’s buildup toward dramatic tension, and it’s done effectively: eerily lit time-lapse nature footage punctuated by waves of white noise and color-saturated, slow-motion shots create a nightmarish atmosphere for the carnage to unfold in. The alternation between handheld and dollied camera is seamless, and Von Trier even experiments with lenses in the former case, making for an especially distorted register in some of the film’s most intense moments. But finding the natural extreme of a career that counts...
...begins as confusion wavers and then diminishes into the reality: “Antichrist” is an embarrassment audacious enough to reassure only a man like Lars Von Trier. A self-styled radical better known for narrative transgression and the outmoded Dogme 95 manifesto than any one particular film, Von Trier reveals himself finally and totally in “Antichrist” as the spoiled child of the art house: an auteur who insists that his films merely stand as pieces around which he himself can be discussed. In so blatantly passing off exploitation as art, the lesson...