Von Trier’s arrogance pays off in Antichrist

As Saw VI festers in theaters, American horror and the torture-porn subgenre have become inextricably connected. And just about nobody sees this as a step in the right direction.

The main flaw usually assigned to these particular horror films is the nihilistic quality of the violence. After all, without characters identifiable on a psychological level, the only connection a person can forge with a tortured co ed is a visceral one. There’s terror to be found in graphic mutilation, but not the kind that sticks around after the credits roll.

Lars von Trier addresses this issue with Antichrist. After Michel Haneke’s 2007 Funny Games US remake, Antichrist is the second film on psychological and physical torture by a celebrated European auteur in recent years.

Von Trier — legendarily arrogant Danish filmmaker behind Breaking the Waves and Dogville — has never had a film arrive in theaters without a trail of controversy. Antichrist is no different, and the debate over its merits rages on with each review posted.

Antichrist is the study of the psychological deformation of a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both brilliant) that loses a child. To help cure his wife’s dangerous depression, the husband retreats with her to their forest cabin (called Eden) where things, as they say, take a turn toward the very weird.

As Dafoe and Gainsbourg play menacing games with each other in the woods, the film’s plot and characters become almost incomprehensible, especially in a single viewing. A film initially about grief suddenly becomes about societal perceptions of women — a common subject for von Trier — and as the film’s setting becomes more surreal and horrifying, so do the actions of the characters.

Antichrist works on both a visceral and psychological level, but the story’s sudden twists and turns might be too much for an audience already assaulted by a breadth of jarring images and cinematic technique.

The director’s semi-deserved status as, well, that Danish asshole might turn the average horror-lover away from Antichrist; the film is replete with examples of what a glib cultural critic like Family Guy would call pretentious European art film flourishes.

To von Trier’s credit, most of those artistic decisions work the way they are intended to — he breaks established cinematic rules to continually increase the audience’s discomfort. And, Antichrist might also contain the only appropriate use of a fisheye lens ever in a film.

Even Dafoe’s strange encounter with an animal at the midpoint of the film, which sets the entire audience into giggles, becomes terrifying once the mind overcomes the silliness of the moment and places it within the context of von Trier’s world. Antichrist works because every scene, regardless of sheer strangeness, adds to the underlying tension and horror of the piece as a whole.

The film continually builds its truly off-putting surreal atmosphere, and von Trier is smart enough to give his audience release. The final 30 minutes are among the most psychologically and visually scarring that I have ever seen in a film. Von Trier lets the graphic sexuality and horrific violence of the disintegration of the characters’ world match the internal terror and despair they feel throughout the film’s first two-thirds. For once, the emotional identification we find with the characters is deserved and — wonderfully — truly lasting.

Antichrist demands comparison to the aforementioned Funny Games Haneke’s examination of an upper-class American family’s collision with a psychotic but charming pair of youths is seemingly borrowed from A Clockwork Orange. Haneke, a former psychologist and director of the great Caché, made the film as a cinematic experiment in seeing just how much banal death and torture Americans could stand before leaving their seats in disgust.

What sets von Trier’s film apart from Haneke’s is that, for all of the Danish director’s strange artistic choices, Antichrist takes itself very seriously. Funny Games was about getting into the skulls of a torture-porn lover and showing them the banality of the violence.

Haneke’s smirking, self-satisfied object lesson of a film was so infuriating because it didn’t treat itself or its audience with any respect. Sure, the film is deeply unsettling in its own right, but once the lights return and you re-enter the real world, the realization that Haneke was trying to force a lesson essentially meant for mainstream American audiences down the throats of a smaller art house crowd leaves a bitter taste indeed.

Both Antichrist and the concurrently released Paranormal Activity are horror films about the way that breaking the rules of cinema and video can shake us deeply. Antichrist also appeals to the secretly sadomasochistic impulses in our psyches and then violent upsets those impulses in its psychotic conclusion.

If the Saw and Hostel films hold some attractive power over you, Antichrist might be, against all reason, your favorite horror film of 2009. Even if you consider the very name Lars von Trier to be inseparably associated with incomprehensible European art films, the maverick auteur is still the master behind the most challenging horror film of the year — a work truly worthy of the season when we actively seek to be frightened.

John Wheeler is a senior majoring in cinema-television critical studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures. His column, “The Multiplex,” runs Fridays.