In Lars von Trier’s muy controversial Antichrist—and all real cult films are controversial—a couple rot from the inside out after their infant innocently falls out of a high window one frosty night while they’re having sex in the next room.
We only see three human faces in the entire difficult course of its 110-odd minutes. We get Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as the parents (neither are named), and a brief scene of their doomed li’l cherub. (There are a few extras in the funeral scene, but Trier blurs them out into featureless apparitions.) After they bury the baby, Dafoe and Gainsbourg go on what’s intended to be a therapeutic retreat to a secluded rural cabin, but things don’t end well. I’d hate to spoil it, but let’s just say the film goes from Ingmar Bergman to Takashi Miike.
A lot of critics throw the big “M” word (misogynist) at this one because, along with Trier’s general tendency to run his female characters through the emotional wringer, Charlotte Gainsbourg is the more withered, shaken, and unstable of our couple. She blows a fuse early on in the film and never fixes it.
But I actually find Willem Dafoe more unsettling. He’s apparently a trained psychologist, but not an actual doctor (he hates the medical profession), and he clicks into creepy therapist mode while Charlotte Gainsbourg grieves openly. He feeds her drugs and a lot of textbook malarky, and usually with that same glaze of condescension that you sometimes see in doctors, but she only gets worse. I don’t blame her.
Lars von Trier claims that he made this film during a phase of his own severe depression. It shows.