Antichrist - From a Sunny Beach To a Much Darker Place

I was studying in a film school and during the spring time in 2009 our class went to Cannes Film Festival as part of some international thing. We got the badges and were able to go and see what ever we wanted, well not the red carpet premieres, but everything else.

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One that everyone was talking about was Lars von Trier's Antichrist. I had seen couple of his movies and watched the tv-series, Kingdom, which is horror in hospital and is scary as hell.
My favorite von Trier film is actually a musical Dancer in the Dark with icelandic singer Björk in the lead role. I'd say probably best musical I've ever seen...or maybe it is La La Land nowadays.

Anyways, Antichrist is a film about a couple who move to a country side cabin after facing a horrible tragedy. They are about to start the healing process in this remote location but unfortunately things will start to go really bad for them.

Willem Dafoe is He and Charlotte Gainsbourg is She. They both do an amazing job in their roles and Gainsbourg won the award for best actress in Cannes that year.
Nature also plays a big part in this movie and in small details, like how the blowing wind is used in some scenes. Nature in this case is not so friendly place and wind and moving leaves create somewhat uneasy feeling, something that you cannot quite put your finger on. This in particular reminds me of Andrei Tarkovskys film Mirror. Antichrist is in fact dedicated to the russian film maker.

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So here I was at the back row of a movie theater having some wine and people laughing before the film begun. The was no laughter during the film, maybe because Antichrist is extremely graphic and brutal film. From the first, heartbreaking, but also straight forward pornographic scene to many violent surprises.

I remember maybe twenty people suddenly got and up left the theater in an instant. What I don't remember was it because of this weird scene where a fox says, "chaos reigns!" or was it perhaps the close up of female genitalia being mutilated.
Later on one of my friends told me that the people who left were buyers and these kind of images would be just too much for some countries. After Cannes, the production company informed that they were going to cut the film into a "catholic version" that would be more suitable for southern Europe, Asia and United States.

Afterwards we took a train back to Nice where we were staying and I had to take a short walk on the English Promenade to digest what I saw. I remember I was smiling, not because I enjoyed the violent scenes, but because the film made an impact on deeper levels. As a huge horror movie fan I find it really rare to come across this kind of feeling of an unexplained terror.
I also loved the contrast of walking from a sunny beach to see a movie which takes you to darkest places of human mind.

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Some people wanted to ban Antichrist that year and few years later the director himself was banned for saying something about how he relates to nazis. Lars von Trier has said that he suffered from deep depression before Antichrist and during the making of it.

I didn't make this for you - Lars von Trier

Antichrist have been accused of misogyny, being called an abomination and it's director was said to "have gone mad". Yet some critics gave it great reviews.
Maybe von Trier was trying to deal with his depression through the film and in order the to do so he had to be honest and that way perhaps find a catharsis of some kind.
Yes, it is insanely brutal film but also very honest film and because of that it manages to bring some unique movie magic to horror genre.

Thank you for reading!

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