Antichrist

Drew's Thoughts:
As the unofficial PFA president I sometimes take it upon myself to test out a movie to see if it's worth recommending to the Dolphin voting body. Also it was the night before Halloween and I felt like watching a horror movie.
Lars von Trier's (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) bitterly divisive film Antichrist debuted at Cannes earlier in the year to cries of outrage over it's graphic, brutal imagery. Von Trier's infamous cinematic philosophy "a film should be like a pebble in your shoe" has morphed into something more akin to "a film should be like a rusty, 19th century handdrill boring a hole into your shin."
The film centers around a Seattle couple whose young toddler crawls out the window to his death while the couple is having sex. The woman played by Charlotte Gainsbourg (the film only has two characters--neither has a name) is emotionally and mentally devastated and goes in and out of consciousness in a month-long hospital stay. Her husband played by Willem Dafoe is a psychologist, and seems more interested in treating her like a grief-stricken patient than a grief-stricken wife. Upon his advice that facing the pain head-on is best, the couple set out to Eden, their cabin out in the remote wilderness as he attempts to get her to follow his bullshit therapeutic "tests" (including drawing a triangle on piece of paper). As the movie goes along there's all sorts of strange surreal nature imagery (including a fox that hisses "chaos reigns") and pseudo-symbolism as it becomes increasingly apparent the woman is seriously fucked up in the head though the man doesn't realize it until she completely and violently snaps. What follows from there is all the controversial stuff, seriously brutal, graphic violent images that you can't unsee. Stuff that made my body twinge with pain while watching it. Pretty horrifying stuff.
Though many critics have a love it or hate it attitude, I'm pretty in the middle on it. The film succeeds on an experiential level; the actors, especially Gainsbourg, give entirely fearless performances which is commendable, Anthony Dod Mantle's (Slumdog Millionaire) strange, warped cinematography is cool, and it's just an intense experience overall. Where the film fails though is in all the intellectual/philosophical content. It hints at philosophical/historical references of witchcraft (which the woman was researching for an abandoned thesis) but it's all so thin and underdeveloped it was pretty pointless throwing it in there. Not having a sturdy philosophical base harms the film. If von Trier had just left it as a story of a woman rapidly deteriorating mentally and her husband who is too up his own ass to help her then it may have worked better devoid of the worthless subtext.
In closing, considering I am the biggest von Trier fan in the PFA and my reaction was fairly middle of the road I'd probably recommend the PFA not watch this movie. That time would be better spent watching Dogville or Dancer in the Dark.