'Antichrist' Chills With Horrifying Storyline

Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is the most stressful moviegoing experience I've had in a theater, and that's not to say it isn't great or that you shouldn't see it. In the last 30 minutes, Charlotte Gainsbourg is the most terrifying onscreen provocation in recent cinema. Not since Takashi Miike's "Audition," where Asami Yamazaki exacts revenge of the limb-severing kind on a bad boyfriend, has a female presence been so shocking. However, the places von Trier takes her are significantly darker than the ghastly moments Miike takes his actress. And again, this is not to say you should not see this film.

Von Trier's latest indignation of female sexuality contains the spare scaffold of a narrative. Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, the only actors in the film, play an unnamed couple whose young son, one very savvy in the art of opening doors and windows, dies suddenly. His unexpected death throws Gainsbourg's character into a psychological torpor, and her husband, a psychiatrist, attempts to grapple with her delicate state-and that's an understatement. In an act of what any sane person would call sadism, he takes her to their very off-putting and very sinister cabin in the woods of Washington, a cabin suspiciously called Eden-a moment of heavy-handed symbolism-that facilitates both horror and madness which mere words cannot broach.

Suffused with a grim color palette and an unshakable feeling of malaise, "Antichrist" is shot beautifully by Anthony Dod Mantle ("Slumdog Millionaire"), who successfully marries von Trier's minimalist trademarks with gothic imagery. The opening sequence, a black-and-white operatic prologue, is standalone brilliance in its use of slow motion. Some of the shots in the first 10 minutes move as slowly as a still photograph yet are as riveting as some of the film's more visceral spectacles. As an aesthetically rich vision filled with mythic imagery, "Antichrist" is a gorgeous, albeit deadly, thing to look at.

While von Trier often entrenches his self-proclaimed masterpiece in overwrought allegory, his barrage of ideas, ranging from the philosophical to the religious, fascinate as they tear at your guts.

Aside from the gruesome on-camera shock moments, the film's most terrifying sequences involve animals, as von Trier offers startling moments of a talking fox, a deer giving birth and a crow squawking from underground. These creatures become paramount to the film's themes of the religious and the supernatural, which, of course, never reveal themselves fully.

Gainsbourg's best actress award at Cannes is a controversial yet redeemable choice. Her portrayal of a woman stricken with impossible grief is stunning; just as we have her sympathies as a mother, we are horrified by the evils she is capable of as a wife. The fury of this woman scorned is a terrifying thing.

Dafoe offers an oft-necessary rational counterpart to Gainsbourg's hysterics, playing the kind of husband who must be very devoted to his wife to go through hell-without any certainty of coming out of it-with her. Given there are only two actors in "Antichrist," and given von Trier's penchant for pushing the buttons of his stars, these demanding performances somehow make the discomfort in seeing this film more redeemable.

"Antichrist" is something like a bad drug experience: full of anxiety, with the capacity to subvert your entire world, yet in the end you're still grateful you endured it. After the crashing and the coming-to, you have a little bit more of an understanding of the world, as well as the borderless nature of the imagination. This is an important film in an extremely polarizing career, but it is perhaps a trip that doesn't merit a second visit.