Nina Power: The blanked-out faces of not only the other funeral-goers, but also of the massed women at the end, indicate that this is a story whose explicit focus is indeed the unhappy bourgeois couple and its miseries. These two are failures, lost in their own mirror world of goading games and compulsive sex. Some kind of drop-out? Struck-off? And one wonders if her rattle bag of a dissertation-which she cannot finish-on “Gynocide” has ever had any institutional ratification.
This is a calamitous, solipsistic couple. After he confronts her about the coroner’s report of Nic’s injured feet, he seems only interested in what the revelation of child abuse tells him about her psychology (via a ridiculous pyramid graph of her fears). The true extent of their negligence will be revealed toward the end, when a flashback discloses that she was watching as the toddler climbed onto the window ledge from which the fatal fall then occurred.But Antichrist has not stinted on clues to her wrongdoing: the ragged chick devoured by its bird-of-prey parent, a self-taken Polaroid showing Nic playing behind his glassy-eyed mother who looms menacingly in the foreground, a flashback in which Nic wails as she forces the wrong shoes on him. It is as if the dead child, Nic, were taking a last reproachful look at his parents. The next scene is the funeral, the couple filmed, in a shot reminiscent of the trapped hero’s view from the coffin in Dreyer’s Vampyr, through the hearse window. Recalling Don’t Look Now, it begins with a child’s death while mother and father (simply credited as “she” and “he,” played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) have sex. Antichrist’s concerns are contemporary-gender, ecology, science-and its accomplishment, easy to recognize so long as one is not too distracted by the gore, is to explore these philosophical themes cinematically.Īntichrist is also a carefully plotted thriller. There are comparisons to be made with the current vogue for “torture porn” horror, but a better initial reference point is a group of 1970s films: The Night Porter, In the Realm of the Senses, and Salò, all of which relate sexual violence to mid-century fascism. Rob White: Antichrist is already making headlines because of the explicitness of its sexual violence (especially two acts of genital mutilation). For ease of reference, a synopsis is provided at the end. SPOILER WARNING: Please be aware that the piece assumes familiarity with Antichrist and does contain major plot spoilers. This web-exclusive exchange between Film Quarterly editor Rob White and philosopher Nina Power is meant as a first attempt at the in-depth debate that this major film deserves. Dense, shocking, and thought-provoking, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is a film which calls for careful analysis.
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