He is a therapist played by Willem Dafoe. She was a scholar working on a thesis about witchcraft who is inhabited by Charlotte Gainsbourg.
They are the tormented souls at the center of “Antichrist,” Lars Von Trier’s masterful and cruel allegory about a couple who returns to a cabin in the woods called Eden after the loss of their young son.
“Antichrist” is one of three movies coming soon to an art house near you that could be described as philosophical horror movies. Along with John Hillcoat’s “The Road” and Michael Haneke’s masterful “The White Ribbon,” “Antichrist” delivers images that make us want to, if not scream, tremble.
Based on Cormac McCarthy’s bleak fable, “The Road” deals with family and the end of the world as we know it. Haneke’s pre- World War I drama about increasingly strange goings-on in a German village takes a pickax to the roots of fascism.
They are works for adults who may not want to be frightened but need to be every now and again.
While Von Trier’s film deals with the sexes in crisis, it reflects a more inward-tilted nightmare. There are hints of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” The director gives his long-standing fondness for August Strindberg room to torment his characters. Like the Swede, he has tortured ideas about men (idiots, is his word) and women (masochists).
Gainsbourg won the acting award at Cannes. By turns abjectly comatose and sexually feral, she infuriates.
Dafoe’s visage is a mask chisled from stone, a face losing ground to its skull. A cognitive therapist, he quickly breaks the rules of engagement when he takes on that role in relationship to his wife.
What of his grief? It can’t be good for them, all his reasoned working through. Can it?
The filmmaker has said “Antichrist” is a particularly personal work. He wrote it in the midst of a debilitating depression.
And depression brought on by unfathomable grief is the ostensible reason He and She head to the woods. The death of a child is one of those fissures in a marriage that can stretch into a chasm. This one suggests a bottomless pit.
But the clinical isn’t what fuels the emotional conflagrations that follow. And grief isn’t quite what it appears.
Von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle use sumptuous black-and-white photography and saturated color. Few movies are as beautifully wrought as this.
“Antichrist” opens mid-lovemaking. The camera does not blink as He and She couple. Nor does their young son, who scrambles out of his crib and happens upon that primal scene, scored to Handel’s Rinaldo HWV 7 “Lascia Ch’io Pianga.”
Instead, Von Trier makes a slow-motion abstract of intercourse. (The film is not rated but has scenes of frank sexuality and violence.) The opening sets the tone for images that swing from seductive to jarring, from lulling to disquieting, stunning to repulsive.
Dafoe and Gainsbourg perform from frightening heights without nets. The director demands ferocious eros and muted (then not) menace of the actors.
In the midst of the story (told in chapters befitting a grim fairy tale), in the deep of the woods, their roles reverse. Dafoe’s facade of control is crumbling, at least in his dreams. Distorted daylight visions suggest the therapist is not as clear-eyed as he’d have his mate believe.
Von Trier has never been easy on his actors, especially his female performers. Nicole Kidman — Grace in the wicked and beautiful “Dogville” — reportedly asked the director why he was so evil to women. It is not an unreasonable question of the director of the unforgiving “Breaking the Waves” and wrenching “Dancer in the Dark.” He is often called a misogynist.
The final letter in the title hints at troubles to come: It isn’t a “t,” but the symbol for female. In “Antichrist,” the director mixes nature and witchcraft in an acrid brew that, read quickly, says ugly things about nature and the nature of women.
What’s bedeviling (and compelling) about “Antichrist” is it refutes hasty conclusions. Von Trier’s nightmare requires serious analysis.
“Antichrist.”
Not rated but stark scenes of nudity and violence 1 hour, 49 minutes. Written and directed by Lars Von Trier; photography by Anthony Dod Mantle; starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Opens today at the Mayan theater.
