Oh, Please God, Not the Scissors. Anything but the Scissors.

Not since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho have the opening credits seemed so essential to a film as they do in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. They begin lingering on von Trier's scrawled in chalk then immediately cutting to the title of the film, suggesting that the true antagonist in the motion picture is the director himself. And after seeing what unfolds over the next two hours, it's hard to argue with that assessment: we various acts of mutilation, the death of a child, trippy visions of dead animals walking around the woods, the painful shrieks of Charlotte Gainsborough, and just a general mood of unsettling malice.

 The film was a hotbed for criticism when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, with its audience booing, shouting insults, and walking out during the film. Of course, this is nothing new for von Trier, the Danish director who famously tortured Nicole Kidman in his 2003 masterpiece Dogville, who prides himself as being more a provocateur than an auteur.  The international community derided the film not only for its violence and frank sexuality, but for what they felt to be an empty, emotionally distant film that ultimately had nothing to offer them. But when confronted with the reaction, von Trier simply smirked and remarked, "I am the greatest filmmaker in the world."

 The statement, like his film, is meant to provoke the critics, and in this regard I find Antichrist to be a remarkable success. What it has to offer is not a message or any sort of philosophical wisdom presented through tepid and pretentious symbols a lá Michael Haneke (who walked away with the Palm d'Or at the festival for his ponderous film The White Ribbon), but an experience: our stomachs turn with the characters, we feel their pain, anger, and disillusionment, as well as their confusion.

 The plot is simple: an unnamed man and woman travel up to their cabin, in the symbolically (or is it ironically symbolic) charged Eden, so that the woman (simply known as She) can finish her psychological treatment, which is being administered by her husband (simply known as he), following the death of her son. Things turn from bad to worse, nature freaks out, body parts are bludgeoned, others chopped off, and animals talk. The movie seems so loaded with potentially symbolic and allegorical material that everything seems to cancel itself out. Of course, it could be seen as a critique of psychiatry, a misogynistic rant against womankind (Eden, a woman betraying her husband…the dots just seem to connect themselves), or a balls-to-the-wall reinterpretation of Revelations, but the sum of these images taken as a whole seems representative only of von Trier's art. 

The psychiatry element is certainly a nod to von Trier's own collection of phobias and disorders, and the seemingly blatant misogyny of the film a nod to criticisms of von Trier's earlier work, notably Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. But as an animatronic fox says midway through the film: "Chaos reigns." There is no real structure to any of these symbolic elements. They are simply acting as reflection of von Trier's own mind, the film itself seeming to be an imprint of his psyche and a statement of what he believes film to be capable. He sees it as a movie intended to elicit an emotional response based on images, and through the craft of his film he displays this perfectly. The performances he extracted from his two actors, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsborough, are some of the most powerful in recent memory. The emotion projected in their performance is so acute, so precise so as not to overpower the startlingly images that von Trier has put on screen: they don't chew the scenery so much as they become a part of it. The cinematography of the film is astonishing, both beautiful and grotesque, melding the classical tracking shot, with the in-your-face disorientation of the shaking camera: it reflects the psychological breakdown of the characters as well as giving an artistic sheen to gruesome acts of violence on the screen. Make no doubt about it: von Trier is making art and views himself as an artist, no matter the subject matter of his films.

 But while the technique exhibited in the film is excellent, the final product being a taut exercise in horror and provocation, the critics were right in assessing the film as empty. It has none of the emotional depth his earlier films, like Dogville or Breaking the Waves, possessed. Although we go through Hell with these two characters, we never feel like we know anything about them, the two of them seeming to act merely as ciphers or whipping-boys for von Trier's perverse elicitation of horror and disgust. It is a true example of style over substance.

 Yet, if you possess the stomach for the film (it contains both graphic violent and sexual content, as well as some really off-the-wall images), I wholeheartedly suggest you seek it out. (HINT: It's streaming on Netflix Instant right now). I'd like to thank the Cinema Guild for bringing a feature that engages the current critical conversation on film to Sewanee, giving us the opportunity to see a film that has not yet been established as a masterpiece, but is in the early stages of its discussion.