- Director: Lars von Trier
- Writers: Lars von Trier
- Stars: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm
- Runtime: 1 Hour, 48 Minutes
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/34ZjZoG
*Antichrist (2009) *
Synopsis
A baby dies in the first five minutes. The parents go to a remote cabin in the woods, and she goes crazy. They talk a lot of philosophy. The end. OK, now for the summary that’s not nearly as pretentious as the rest of the film:
Prologue:
We start out with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, known only as “he” and “she,” having rather graphic sex in the shower. And in the laundry room. And in the bedroom. In the next room, the baby wakes up and gets out of his crib. He goes over to the window that has blown open in the snowstorm, climbs up, and falls out the window to his death while the parents are still busy in the bedroom, oblivious to what happened. We see his parents smiling at each other, so at least the sex was good.
Chapter 1: Grief
They’re at the funeral. She passes out and ends up in the hospital with depression. They both blame themselves for the death. She’s a complete mess, but he helps her through it. She gets hysterical, beating her head against the toilet seat, and he stops her so they can have more sex. They decide to go to their country cabin in the woods, called “Eden” to help get over the crisis.
Chapter 2: Pain
On the way there, they take a train, and he hypnotizes her. She dreams of walking through a hazy countryside that looks very dark and mysterious. They walk to the cabin, and he spots a deer with a dead baby deer hanging from its tail. She suddenly has some kind of aversion to standing or walking on grass, but he comes up with a silly “exercise” to help her get over it. She does the exercise then watches a baby bird fall out of a tree and gets eaten within seconds. The acorns keep falling on the roof, each one of them dying. The symbolism here beats us over the head, and not nearly as subtly as the acorns.
She is depressed, tormented, emotional, and hysterical, and he is annoyingly logical and analytic. They go for a walk, and he sees a fox eating it’s own stillborn baby. The fox looks up at him and says “Chaos reigns!”
Chapter 3: Despair
During a storm, he goes up into the attic and finds a bunch of pictures of demons and medieval torture. The pictures and the crazy book he found must have been hers. She was writing her thesis on cruelty to women, but instead, her take-away was that women are evil and deserve it. They have sex again, and she wants him to beat her up. He refuses, so she goes outside into the woods to masturbate. That’s OK, because he changes his mind, goes outside, and beats her up as she asked.
The autopsy report comes and mentions that there was an abnormality in the baby’s feet. He finds in a photo that she had put the boy’s shoes on the wrong feet. Then he notices it in all the pictures. He thinks she did it on purpose to make the baby suffer. Or maybe the baby just has weird feet and she put the shoes on backwards to cover for it. We don’t know.
She hits him over the head (and other, more sensitive places) with a log and knocks him out. She then drills a hole in his leg and bolts a huge weight to it. She’s way crazier than we gave her credit for. He wakes up and crawls outside to hide in a tiny little cave, where he battles a vulture that won’t stay dead. She digs after him until the cave collapses, burying him.
Chapter 4: The Three Beggars
She digs him out, but he’s not quite dead. She drags him back into the house. She explains that “When the three beggars arrive, someone must die.” She’s going to sacrifice him when the time comes. The fox, the deer, and the vulture come inside: they’re the three beggars. He finally manages to pull the weight out of his leg bone, jumps up, and strangles her. He burns her body and begins the long trek on crutches back to wherever they parked. As he walks, we see the whole countryside is covered with ghostly bodies that only we can see and don’t actually seem to mean anything other than it looks cool.
Epilogue:
As he walks back to the road, he see the three beggars again, and they seem to be seeing him off. He then sees hundreds of faceless people coming out of the woods past him, which also looks cool but doesn’t seem to mean anything.
Commentary
This is another movie that should have been a twenty minute short. It took them 41 minutes to actually get to the cabin. She didn’t drill the hole in his leg until the hour and 18 minute mark. The last twenty minutes were entertaining, but that’s when she starts getting to be like any other crazy-woman-who-saw-Misery-once-too-many-times character would do.
There’s some great camera work, and the film looks really good; very colorful and visually fascinating. The acting is excellent all around, and there’s only two actors. It’s just so “talky” and “philosophic” that it’s hard not to see how pretentiously artsy-fartsy this is. And there are a ton of things that make no sense and serve no purpose other than to look neat. And what’s the deal with the title? Was the baby the Antichrist? Where’d they pull that idea from?
I don’t get it.