Antichrist (2009)

This Lars Von Trier film is categorized as "Horror." Full of symbolism and primal material, this is a wild movie...quite shocking in many ways. I wrote about Lemming back in January, where I first discovered Charlotte Gainsbourg. Like the character in that film, we see her again as another disturbed woman. CG was born into a family of performers and has some kind of cult-status a singer/songwriter of "dream pop."

This film begins quite dreamily as we see a couple making love while their toddler child awakens in the night and climbs up to the ledge of a window that has blown open in a winter storm. He falls to his death and the man and woman are left to deal with enormous grief. She collapses into a dysfunctional state and is hospitalized for a month. He therapist husband finally takes matters into his own hands. Back home, he begins practicing therapy on her himself and discovers an underlying fear for a place called "Eden," where they have a cabin in the woods. Though unconventional for a therapist to treat his own wife, he feels nobody else is capable of the task. He makes her flush the medications, and they take off to spend time at the cabin in the woods where he begins exercises in exposure therapy. There is lots of nudity and in your face sexual moments.

The film is sectioned into chapters titled, Grief, Pain, Despair. The primal forces of nature begin to reveal themselves. The cabin is pelleted with falling acorns. As he assists his wife to unravel her inner life, he also discovers her unfinished thesis on Gynocide that the wife was supposed to have completed the previous summer she spent the cabin with the young child. He also begins to see that her growing fear the woods not only compromised her ability to do her work, but she may have neglected the child during that time. She comments at one point that "nature is Satan's church." We begin to believe his therapy is working when the wife admits she is feeling happy again, but deeper darker events unfold. In some ways, this film is like a long unrelenting nightmare, yet thought-provoking...and yes, horrifying.