18 • 104 mins • 24 July

Director: Lars von Trier

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Rating:

Look, just ignore our star rating for the moment, okay? Antichrist is the kind of film that many viewers will give zero stars, or minus five stars, and no doubt the enfant terrible director Lars von Trier (The Idiots, The Kingdom) would be gutted if they didn’t. The best we can do is offer a process of elimination. If you couldn’t stomach, say, Audition or The Piano Teacher, don’t see Antichrist. If you thought Synecdoche, New York was unwatchably up itself, stay away too. And if you think there are some squidgy parts of the human anatomy that should stay unravaged on screen, skip this film. If you answered “no” each time, you may still loathe Antichrist, but at least you won’t be throwing up over it.

Indeed, the audience vomiting may drown out the fact that Antichrist is, amid everything else, a showpiece for two fine actors, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are practically the sole humans in the film. They play a married couple who lose their baby son in a glacially stylised opening sequence. Dafoe’s character is a paternal therapist, who tries to bring his wife through her agony of grief (and we’re talking agony, raw and bleeding). During their chaotic “therapy” sessions, the wife talks of her fear of the woods, and Dafoe promptly takes her to a remote cabin. Uh-oh.

What follows... Well, if you’ve seen Audition, then Antichrist follows a similar trajectory, only worse. What starts as a sinister but grimly compelling psycho-drama, with the occasional moment of tenderness, suddenly collapses into fare that makes Saw or Hostel look fluffy. There’s a lot about our primal terrors of nature, including a moment of Lynchian weirdness with a speaking fox, and some in-your-face provocation regarding nasty medieval misogyny. There are glimpses of Misery, The Shining and The Evil Dead, and some superlatively warped sylvan cinematography from Anthony Dod Mantle, fresh from shooting Mumbai for Slumdog Millionaire.

You may be gripped by Antichrist’s depraved fairytale, or write it off as arthouse excrement. Either way, we guarantee you’ll be relieved as hell when it’s over.

Andrew Osmond