ANTICHRIST

While a couple is having sex, their baby leaves the crib, climbs onto the windowsill, and falls to his death. A month after the tragic event, the woman is still tormented by grief and guilt, so her husband, a psychotherapist, decides to find a solution to her depression by uncovering and making her confront her worst fear. The two then head to Eden, a wooded area where the woman used to retreat with the baby to write her thesis and which has now suddenly become the place that frightens her the most. However, their stay in the cabin in the woods turns into a terrible nightmare filled with unsettling and bloody events. It is said that "Antichrist" stemmed from a moment of deep depression that director Lars Von Trier went through a few years ago, and it's easy to believe, given the existential pessimism, despair, and constant sense of discomfort that emanates from every frame of this film. "Antichrist" is a highly anomalous work, a 110-minute self-analysis session that takes the form of an intimate yet universal fresco of fears, anxieties, and obsessions. Von Trier creates one of his most bizarre and uneven works, yet brings to life a fascinating gem of pitch-black color. By structuring the narrative into chapters, each dedicated to a phase of the protagonist's depressive state, the director writes a black gospel that begins with the death of an innocent and continues with an obsessive mourning that turns into madness and martyrdom, culminating in an ending that is both liberating and unsettlingly apocalyptic. Grief and the resulting pain, however, are merely a device that transcends a situation of metaphysical abstraction into tangible reality, rooted in religious symbolism and paganism, where God is completely overshadowed by the actions of Satan, free to act through his "messengers." In a situation of constant alternation between symbolism and religion, psychiatry, madness, and extreme violence, the universe of "Antichrist" unfolds, in which two excellent actors improvise as new Adam and Eve, vehicles and victims of sin, who, upon returning to Paradise (Eden, the wooded area where much of the film is set, is an explanatory name), find themselves in the grip of evil. Eden is a world without rules where "Chaos reigns," a place as immaculate as it is soaked in morbidness and malice. In this, Von Trier's work has been exemplary, capable of giving a real aura of unease in every single camera movement intended to emphasize the swaying of the leaves and the falling of the acorns; in this case, the appropriate use of sounds (the wind in particular, but also the obsessive ticking of the acorns first, and then the hail) alone manages to create an effective atmosphere that on more than one occasion is capable of giving the viewer goosebumps. And since in this timeless and rule-less place it is chaos, it is evil, that reigns supreme, the cards are continuously reshuffled: the man keeps the situation under control, is attentive, calculating, and capable of reacting firmly to the omens (the three healers) that manifest themselves to him; at the same time, however, the man is weak, prey to sexual desire that leads him to the dismantling of all his certainties. The woman is a symbol of sin, she is the Eve who picks the apple in a continuous and increasingly atypical motion, she is first a victim and then a temptress, executioner and then martyr again. The woman is (anti)Christ and through her sacrifice a new reality presents itself to human perception. Von Trier and his film ended up at the center of a highly inflated scandal that, unexpectedly, caused the aversion of much of the criticism. Instead of the predictable majority of approvals, at Cannes 2009 (where "Antichrist" was presented in competition) the film by Von Trier collected especially boos, accused in a rather reckless manner of misogyny, pornography, and indulgence in extreme violence. The misogyny is relative and depends mostly on the key with which the work is read - and there are many - also enjoyable as a feminist film that reinterprets the past (present and future) "Gynocide," providing a form of revenge for the victim-woman. Regarding violence, pornography, and the pornography of violence, it is true that the film uses them, sometimes it is even pregnant with them, but it is all perfectly functional. Eroticism takes on pornographic connotations in a couple of scenes, but this only increases the discomfort that the film MUST transmit to the viewer, and in which it succeeds fully, thanks to the mature and non-erotic bodies of the two protagonists. Visual violence reaches very high levels, especially in the last half hour, and features mutilations and self-mutilations that reach their peak with bloody ejaculations and infibulations. Willem Dafoe ("Existenz"; "Spiderman") and Charlotte Gainsbourg ("Nuovomondo"; "I'm Not There") are the only two actors on the scene, perfect and particularly immersed in the difficult role (which earned Gainsbourg the Palme d'Or at Cannes). Von Trier directs with great mastery, experimenting less than usual but playing the card of formal elegance that exploits the alternation of black and white (prologue and epilogue) and pastel colors, the succession of lyrical music ("Lascia che io pianga" by Handel, again for prologue and epilogue) and unsettling forest sounds. "Antichrist" is not a film for everyone, in fact, perhaps it is a film for a few. An original, anomalous, complex, sometimes even cryptic horror that combines physical and psychological, flesh and brain, and has the merit of lending itself to multiple interpretations. A beautiful voice out of the chorus that perhaps has the only fault of ostentatious self-complacency. Watch it. Love it, hate it, but watch it.