While doing said research, she comes to the conclusion that women actually ARE evil and, in the midst of self-loathing, decides to succumb to the part.įirst, she physically abuses their son in secret and then, we find out, that she was responsible for the child’s seemingly “accidental” death.
In this case: men are good (if conceited douches) and women are evil (or perhaps “violently insane with grief” would do better).Īnd this isn’t just some misogynistic misinterpretation on my part, either, and here’s where we tarry into SPOILER country, so back off if you don’t want to have anything ruined for you.Īs the film progresses, we find out that “she” originally journeyed to the cabin with their son to research her thesis about how women have been oppressed and branded as “evil” by male authorities over the centuries. When the theme of your film lingers on a “battle of the sexes”, that seems like a fairly poor call of judgment when you’ve already designated the characters as “good” and “evil”, as that just means the audience is going to associate those traits with the gender you’ve assigned them to. “She” is just straight-up bonkers and quickly becomes the clear-cut “villain” of the picture. “He” may be something of a dick, but he means well.
Antichrist is touted (at least on the DVD box) as a “battle of the sexes”, but when it comes to who it’s tempting the audience to root for, the end result is a fairly lopsided portrayal. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “she” is just cuh-ray-zee and may test your patience at times, but Gainsbourg really sells the part and when “she” finally snaps, the character becomes sincerely frightening and threatening.īut therein rests the problem.
No, Willem Dafoe plays the character of “he” with a certain smarmy, “I’m always right, you’re always wrong” attitude that makes you want to hate him, but with enough of a touch of genuine concern that you can’t fault him too much for his rather ill-plotted rehabilitation methods. The supernatural elements are sparse and often times pointless nonsense (a talking fox, for instance), though certain visuals are freaky-enough to make you lean away from your television set (the doe with the still-birth comes to mind).Īntichrist is very well-acted (relying exclusively on the “two-man show” nature means it’d have to be), but the problem with the characters isn’t in the casting. To lay on the positive commentary first, the atmosphere in Antichrist is superb, relying heavily on discomforting ambient sound (particularly a constant hail of acorns on the cabin roof) and crafting an overall sense of isolation that few movies can equal. This is where the film excels in atmosphere while simultaneously decaying in the coherency department. “He” is a doctor with a bit too much of a superiority complex, thinking that he alone can cure his wife’s depression, thus throwing caution to the wind and forcing his wife to take a trip to the last place she was alone with their baby: A cabin in the woods.
THE ANTICHRIST 2009 MOVIE MOVIE
This is actually where Antichrist improves, as once the non sequitur of a credit sequence is out of the way, the movie takes its head out of its own ass and starts feeding us story in a manner more digestible. The prologue gets the back story out of the way, showing us the tragic death of their child, which is a striking visual despite the presentation boiling down to nothing but a duplicate of Jay Sherman’s student film from The Critic. It essentially sets the tone for the entire film a pretentious sack of drivel, delusional in its own psychological depth while in reality doing nothing but stringing together cliché after cliché to the ooohing and aaahing of no one but the Criterion Collection. The opening pre-credits sequence for Antichrist feels like every art school student film ever made. A foreboding and nigh-supernatural atmosphere envelops them, as “she” proceeds to go positively bananas and “he” finds his life falling into considerable jeopardy. After the tragic death of their infant child, a grieving father played by Willem Dafoe, and identified only as “he”, joins his distraught wife played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, identified only as “she” (you can already tell what kinda film this is gonna be, can’t you?) and retreats to a cabin deep in the wilderness to work through their angst.
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