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But with Antichrist, I got so caught up in the physicality and raw power of the performances that I only rarely paused to think, “Hmm.
The antichrist 2009 movie movie#
I’m inclined to criticize a movie where I don’t see the actors as characters, but rather as actors acting. Thank God Dafoe and Gainsbourg are so magnificent in their roles. I had a really hard time buying that He and She would have lasted long enough as a couple to have their dirty laundry come spilling out only in the aftermath of their son’s death I’m not saying that there aren’t relationships that drag on for, say, five years between two wholly un-self-aware, screwed-up people, but He and She felt more like platforms for a shaky thesis on gender stereotypes than actual people that I’m supposed to care about. It’s amazing how much good will a director can build with gorgeous, spooky imagery, while bogging down the audience in conversation after conversation after conversation of unlikable people discovering how much they can’t stand each other. Watching Antichrist is both frustrating and revelatory. She reluctantly agrees, knowing that the secrets she’s been keeping at the cabin make the trip a very bad idea. He decides to bring her to their cabin in the woods for some therapeutic exercises. She is a student who thinks her husband sees her as more of a project than a person. He is a therapist who believes he can pull his wife from the depths of severe depression. We then jump to a world of color and normal pacing, but just barely. During a rigorous bout of intercourse, their young son crawls out of his crib and wanders into their bedroom he reaches for a statue in the window, slips, and falls to his death. The point of that slow-motion prologue is to establish a tragedy that befalls a married couple, He (Dafoe) and She ( Charlotte Gainsbourg). Antichrist is a bizarre and astonishing movie. And it doesn’t get more art-house than a nearly two-hour movie involving only two actors who fight and cry and have sex in the woods-woods beset by ominous acorn storms and populated by demented spirit animals that eat their own innards and gallivant with half-born babies hanging out their rears. Before watching Antichrist, I knew very little about the Danish auteur I’d heard he specialized in sparse art-house fare with bleak storylines and big-name actors debasing themselves for the craft-or something. Then again, this is a Lars von Trier film.
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Chances are, one would not expect to see Willem Dafoe’s cock entering his co-star in slow motion during the first forty-five seconds of a black-and-white prologue. “I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this impossible movie kept me hooked from start to finish.When one sits down to watch a movie called Antichrist, one might expect to see a little devil kid running around maybe a cool demon creature wreaking havoc more than likely some kind of cult trying to bring about the end of the world. It touches on primal nerves while stubbornly exuding a childish petulance for conventional resolution.” - Time Out NY “This is gonzo drama at its most feral, an instinctive and wry mashup of dreamlike images and fairy-tale logic. Yet you can say something about the 53-year-old auteur that couldn’t be applied to everyone with films in the competition: he’s a real moviemaker, a composer of rich imagery as evocative as it is provocative, a master matador at waving a red cape in front of the most jaded viewers and getting them to charge.” - Richard and Mary Corliss, Time “Leave it to von Trier to slap a somnolent Cannes festival to life – in fact, to smack it silly… Filmed in Germany by von Trier’s longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle ( Slumdog Millionaire), Antichrist was greeted with some appreciative applause and rather more vigorous boos, and gave plenty of ammunition to both sides. Gainsbourg won the Best Actress award for her astounding performance as a woman possessed. When French critics cried ‘merde’, Von Trier replied ‘I am the greatest director in the world.’ Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as a couple who retreat to a house in the woods to overcome the grief of losing their only child. Appalling many, thrilling others, outraging all, hailed as a brilliantly hellish vision, dismissed as a stunt, Lars Von Trier’s psychosexual horror film was the one that dominated the headlines from Cannes in a year not short of provocations.