In Theaters: Antichrist

The films of Lars von Trier, the brilliant, bellicose Danish director of The Idiots, Breaking the Waves and Dogville, aspires to the condition of exquisite, immersive poetry -- that is, to be felt, rather than questioned, analyzed, critiqued. His dark fables of human extremity -- sometimes uneven and grasping, often sustained and commanding -- intend to swallow, if not defy digestion. Which is why, when the first, trembling reports began filtering out of Cannes about Antichrist, the first thing I felt was envy. With von Trier's films especially I strive for an ascetically clean slate, and I wouldn't have that pure experience now -- I might never know my true reaction -- because von Trier had clearly made a film that would become unavoidable. And yet having seen the film, my envy was somewhat allayed: I can't be certain, but I suspect my reaction in France would have been the same one I had here -- an exasperated shrug.

Failed poetry grates, reaches beyond itself and mocks the form in the process; its precious self-regard removes the reader from the equation entirely. I felt myself being ejected from Antichrist early on, right around the insert, if you'll pardon the expression, of a penetration shot in the film's grandiloquent prologue. In it the film's stars, He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are partaking of some sweet, naptime action while their toddler sleeps. Close-ups of the couple grappling in luxuriant slo-mo are intercut with the very-much-awake toddler escaping from his child-proof pen. Then comes the hard-core penetration shot, obviously done with stunt genitals, which serves no purpose other than to make thuddingly explicit one of the themes the film offers up randomly, aggressively, and to little satisfaction: the raw and animal nature of humans as both the source of our greatest pleasure and evidence of our utter irrelevance.

The child takes one long, lingering step out of an open window and then falls to his death. In the first of the film's four chapters, "Grief," He, who is a controlling therapist, commandeers his wife's grieving process, hoping to steer her toward a textbook recovery. She, however, just wants to bone, and it is in these early scenes of pure need met by careworn ambivalence that von Trier gets closest to capturing the sadness of certain intimacies. He convinces her to return to the cabin where she spent the previous summer with their son, and in "Chapter Two: Pain (Chaos Reigns)" they settle into a shack (called Eden, sigh) deep in the wilderness.

Shooting on high-definition digital (some of it with Red One cameras), director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle coaxes a textured, layered richness from a limited palette of woodland shadows, and von Trier arranges a series of striking images of Gainsbourg's long, white body flittering through and then integrating (and then madly communing) with the landscape. Nature overwhelms the couple, who seem to make a Himalayan trek to reach their destination; the roof is pelted with a cacophony of acorns as they sleep and Dafoe's hand, hanging out the window one night, is smothered in creepy spores. Seeking retreat they find only deepened chaos, and travel right into the heart of nature's inverted truth: Existence is futile. These chapters comprise a brutal collage of blunt and suggested evidence: The fetus of a fawn hangs from the back end of doe (was it trying to get out or back in?); birds push their rotting chicks to the forest floor; a talking fox snacks on its own entrails; mothers deform their children. Left to his own devices, it seems, the first thing any cognizant child would do is head for an open window.

The couple speaks in cryptic banalities, which becomes more problematic as the film begins to lay rickety allegorical track, ostensibly to carry us through the radical, sexual violence to come. She was at work on a thesis about gynocide, and has a witchy little scrapbook full of increasingly unhinged allusions to the history of female persecution. Declaring that she is "cured," She begins her true descent, having resolved her grief (and totally bollixed her shot at tenure) with the decision that in fact women are inherently evil. The violence that follows is merely startling rather than enthralling, and by the time She takes a pair of scissors to her own privates (having ravaged His), it seems like something worse: idle provocation.

Von Trier has said he intended to make a horror film, and given that this is his first try its immaturity is somewhat understandable. The misogyny argument doesn't concern me that much -- horror films have been punishing female sexual desire since Nosferatu drew in his first, juicy mark. But in horror you can't mess with the metaphor, and Antichrist can't get its metaphorical marbles together; von Trier's throwaway stabs at Satanism and feminist theory sabotage what could have been a much more understated, effective look at grief, psychosis and internecine marital warfare. The resulting incoherence breaks his trademark wave of sensibility into something lesser, something all too easily understood.