The scene is graphic, but it’s appropriate for what it going on. A married couple is fucking (and that course word is the correct one) up against their washing machine as the clothes spin around behind them. The film has one of the best opening of any this year (in fact, had it not been for the marvelous opening scene of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, it would easily be the best). While it is not a film everyone will like – in fact many will loathe it – it is a film that demands to be seen and debated in a serious way. Von Trier is using the basic structure of a martial drama from Ingmar Bergman, and incorporating elements of pornography and the horror film to it. What’s more, the film earns its violent conclusion – in fact it demands it – because of everything that has come before the finale.
There is hardly any violence in the movie at all – it is nearly all in the film’s final act, and it is not nearly as graphic as you have been led to believe. All the hype about how this is the most violent, shocking film in history is complete bullshit. Perhaps it would be best to start out this review by telling you to forget everything that you have heard about Antichrist in the past few months since it debuted at Cannes. And when he makes a film as “scandalous” as Antichrist, and is confronted by a hostile press at the Cannes film festival, I don’t think he can help himself. Like other celebrity directors, like Quentin Tarantino, von Trier seems trapped by the persona he has set up for himself, and feels the need to justify his reputation. He is a provocateur, both in his films and in interviews, but I don’t think he is entirely sincere when he speaks about his own work, and what is on screen, and what he describes, are obviously different. Maybe it’s more gamesmanship by the eccentric von Trier, a brilliant director that you can never trust when he speaks. I am not sure why Lars von Trier dedicated his new film Antichrist to Andrei Tarkovsky, that wonderfully weird, religiously rigid Russian filmmaker, when the film is so clearly inspired by a Scandinavian like von Trier, Ingmar Bergman. Starring: Willem Dafoe (He), Charlotte Gainsbourg (She).