Antichrist: Critic Reviews

The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.

It's one good-looking, publicity-grabbing provocation, with an overlay of pseudo-Christian allegory thrown in to deflect a reasonable person's accusations of misogyny.

The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

Antichrist is a smirking contraption of a film, a cheeky, nasty, clever device for making us upset about the dead kid, making us scared at the creepy happenings, making us freaked out at the violence, and finally making us convulsed with liberal outrage.

The movie immerses itself in the darkest despair imaginable, blending dystopian porn with ghastly horror and graphic violence. But it's all done in a mundane, almost clinical way.

For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema. On at least one level, it's also hateful.

Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience -- the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.

Artfully horrific but artificial and soulless.

By turns repellent, powerful and ludicrous, Antichrist piles horror on horror with pitiless passion.

Antichrist is a unique form of cruel and unusual punishment: an unrelenting orgy of graphic sex, violence and cynicism that also manages to be wildly pretentious.

Von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle use sumptuous black-and-white photography and saturated color. Few movies are as beautifully wrought as this.

Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn't even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-'em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives.

A word to the squeamish: there is no shame in leaving as the tools-and I use the word advisedly-come out. In a way, you will be getting the best of Antichrist, which until now has been a film of awkwardness, confusion, and great beauty.

Von Trier, who has always been a provocateur, is driven to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Bunuel and Herzog.

I'm inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with Antichrist when it was simply unstable but couldn't go with it when it turned insane. It's a useful distinction. And yet the first hour...is pretty stunning.

I can't deny this is filled with powerfully primal images.

What is Von Trier trying to say?

To watch the Danish provocateur's new film is to experience unrelenting pain, shading into revulsion, while being inspired by his virtuoso command of the medium and sharp intelligence.

Self-loathing, mean, ugly and perfectly made, Antichrist is probably the best film ever that you'd recommend to absolutely no one.

Of course, von Trier wants us to react, to be repulsed, shocked, offended. Mission accomplished.

Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist." As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.

Please don't take anything I've said to indicate that Antichrist isn't difficult to watch. It most certainly is, but as somebody (the Marquis de Sade, perhaps) once said: No pain, no gain.

Antichrist ends up being more unnerving than it is terrifying, and a lot funnier than it's supposed to be.

The trouble is that Antichrist feels progressively symptomatic of a director losing heart.

It offers more proof, if we need any, that von Trier is one of the most accomplished cinema artists of our time, and also perhaps the most deeply trapped in his own head.