I'm not kidding when I say that the man has finally crossed the line between genius and insanity that he was always resting on. I feel disturbed just reading some of these suggestive descriptions from the reviews. Obviously a film titled "Antichrist" wasn't going to be filled with rainbows and spontaneous songs about happiness, but HOLY SH*T...my fascination with this movie is actually starting to wane a little. Oy...
Sources: Roger Ebert, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, all from the Cannes screening
"After the woman is pushed to confess that she's most afraid of their property deep in the forest -- where the she spent part of the previous summer alone with her son -- that's where hubby take her. This chapter on "Pain" actually charts the woman's self-proclaimed recovery, but ends unpromisingly with a disemboweled fox rising out of the ferns to announce, "Chaos Reigns."
The ante is upped, and a climax of sorts is achieved, in "Despair," reassuringly subtitled "Gynocide," and if one is uncertain as to what the latter means, rest certain von Trier will graphically illustrate it. Suffice to say the woman's mental health takes a turn for the worse, she vividly pleasures her man in a conspicuously unwelcome manner and then, apparently inspired by images of medieval torture inflicted upon women, finds a way to impale him that Hollywood's leading torture-porn experts will kick themselves over not having dreamed up first.
But the woman generously saves the most gruesome, preferably unwatched act for herself in the final chapter, the title of which, "The Three Beggars," provides no revelations worth waiting for. "
The ante is upped, and a climax of sorts is achieved, in "Despair," reassuringly subtitled "Gynocide," and if one is uncertain as to what the latter means, rest certain von Trier will graphically illustrate it. Suffice to say the woman's mental health takes a turn for the worse, she vividly pleasures her man in a conspicuously unwelcome manner and then, apparently inspired by images of medieval torture inflicted upon women, finds a way to impale him that Hollywood's leading torture-porn experts will kick themselves over not having dreamed up first.
But the woman generously saves the most gruesome, preferably unwatched act for herself in the final chapter, the title of which, "The Three Beggars," provides no revelations worth waiting for. "
"In discussing this self-styled "most important film of my career," von Trier has referred to the forbidding Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Clearly, or rather not so clearly, von Trier is working in a full-out symbolic vein here, as did Strindberg late in his career, but alas the film medium inevitably carries with it, like an albatross, a heavy charge of realism. Hence, many of von Trier's more outrageous, ultra-serious symbolic moments (such as a talking fox, its guts half ripped out, muttering "chaos reigns" in an "Exorcist" voice) will -- and did, in the press screening -- undoubtedly provoke unintended laughter. Or horror, as when genitals are scissored off, masturbation produces blood rather than semen and holes are drilled into legs."
"He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle stab to an inflamed tooth. He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she drills a hole through his leg and bolts a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive. I won't mention two gruesome scenes involving the genital areas."
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