Even his noisiest detractors seem to find no end of delight in denouncing cinema’s self-styled enfant terrible from the very heavens. His defenders, meanwhile, are continually challenged by the Dogme mascot’s need to appal, to enrage, and to revolt in both senses of that word.
Perhaps he’s playing to the gallery. Perhaps he simply wants rid of us. Just when we’ve declared for his ongoing dialogue with golden age Hollywood heroines – see the phenomenal Breaking the Waves – he opts for digital murk and prescribed naturalism. Just when we’ve settling into the angular Brechtian grooves of Dogville, he hits back with a comedy, The Boss Of It All.
Antichrist, another about turn, is most decidedly not a comedy. It is, rather, the Fall of Man retooled into a satisfactorily evil, malevolent, deviant viewing experience. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are tremendous as He and She, a troubled couple grieving for the loss of their son, who, with creepy Freudian implications, fell to his death while his parents were going at it. She falls into a deep depression but He insists that she forego medication in favour of fresh air and his practised psychological brutalisation. They retreat to Eden, their country house for all out war and mental anguish.
The explicit sex and sinister fairytale deployment of place can occasionally make you think you’re watching Ai No Corrida reconfigured by an early ‘70s Nic Roeg. But Antichrist is ultimately far too provocative to be anything other than a von Trier picture. Many have found the film’s money shot – leg gets hole drilled in it, then a metal bar is inserted, then a millstone is attached – to be ludicrously repugnant.
True enough, the Danish director revels in the violence. But this is a nasty, despairing portrait of two people stripping away at each others’ defences until there’s nothing left. It’s not supposed to be nice.
Willing participants will be left shaken, exhilarated and armed with the ability to map Willem Dafoe’s posterior in frightening detail.