Word: triers
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...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 the end of his wife’s treatment, “You don’t have to understand me, just...
...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 sly look that the child gives the camera as he turns from the scene of his parents—Freud’s “primal scene”—that remains the only concept throughout...
From here, Von Trier fashions a conceit from the juxtaposition of modern psychotherapy and bald psychoanalytic symbols. The couple’s respective reactions to grief—Dafoe’s intellectual distance manifest in his treatment of Gainsbourg, whose psychic pain becomes physical—exaggerate at a rate that reaches the suspenseful around the second act, and plows right through to the comically ridiculous by the third. Gainsbourg’s agonizing depression, it seems, is demonic rather than psychological—the wolf whose psychiatric sheep’s clothing leads Dafoe’s analyst...
...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 a visually stirring and intellectually stunted film like 1991?...
...what 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...