Antichrist Review

"There is nothing atypical about your grief", declares an unnamed cognitive therapist (Willem Dafoe) to an unnamed patient (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who also happens to be his wife, and whose grief is, at least in theory, equally his own. Yet in Antichrist, the latest film from Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier, this psychologist's optimistic, even arrogant belief that anguish can be measured, quantified and rationalised will be sorely tested as both he - and viewers - will be taken to the very depths of human despair and depravity, and left there without a meaningful map to find the way back out and home.

If Antichrist deals with raw, primal emotions, its formal prologue (introduced, like all the film's sections, with an intertitle scrawled in childish crayon) is, both in Freudian and Biblical terms, the ultimate primal scene. A toddler climbs out of his cot, watches his parents having explicitly presented sex, and then climbs past three toys (labelled 'Pain', 'Grief' and 'Despair' - also the titles of subsequent chapters in the film) to an open window from which he plummets, with unnerving serenity, to the wintry street below.

Shot in a hyper-detailed slow-motion monochrome that captures every water drop and snowflake, and set to the Baroque strains of an aria from Georg Friedrich Händel's 'Rinaldo', this heady mix of sex and death is all the more horrific for its coolly aestheticised stylisation - and for ending not, as might be expected, on the orgasmic faces of the parents or on the limp body of the child, but on the incongruously domestic image of white clothes spinning in a washing machine.

Antichrist is Von Trier's first foray into the horror genre - but not so much the horror of cheap frights and bogeymen in cupboards, as of the imagination's capacity for violence, perversion and destruction. As the therapist/husband chirpily reminds us, "what the mind can conceive, it can achieve" - and this is a nightmarish film that will present the darkest thoughts and feelings of a traumatised subject (or two) as narrative actions on screen, realised in Anthony Dod Mantle's crisp, occasionally warped, colour digital cinematography.