I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting when going into Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. The buzz I heard was that this was unique, challenging and terrifying. Anticipation and dread filled me coming into this film with the knowledge that the other two films of Von Trier’s I have seen (Dogville and Manderlay) were really terrible. Coming out of the movie, I didn’t really feel challenged, but more confused. What is this movie really getting at?

The movie is broken up into a Prologue, four chapters, and an Epilogue. It stars Willem Defoe as Man and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Woman, an unnamed married couple who lose a young son when the boy falls (or strangely appears to jump) out of their apartment window. The fact that they were having fierce and almost brutal sex while this happens seems to create a rift between the couple. Woman falls into despair and is dying slowly in her grief. Man is a psychologist who takes it on himself to “cure” her by forcing her to face the pain and to accept it. This leads the couple to go out into the woods  to a little cabin called Eden because she is deeply afraid of the woods. As she starts to face her fears, the tables start to turn in their relationship and then begin to turn violent and brutal.

But what is it that Von Trier’s trying to go for here? Metaphors and allusion runs wild in every scene of the movie. I get the idea that he is trying to understand nature of..well…nature. Two battles going on here are man vs. woman and acceptance vs. vengeance. There is no good and evil here because both are evil in very different ways. In fact, there is no goodness in any part of the movie. The movie makes subtle hints at what is called the Three Beggars, three animals that represent different emotional stages of grief, but also the Man, Woman, and Child. But what is he trying to say about grief and it’s relation to sex and nature. Von Trier appears to punish for both accepting death and lashing out against it as Man and Woman do so respectively. It appears that even Von Trier doesn’t even understand what his point is himself.

Now I’m all for trying to explore concepts that a filmmaker isn’t sure about, but when you start using metaphors and personification as is done here, you need to have a pretty firm grasp on your ideas or they are simply empty thoughts. Let’s look at Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, where you can tell that Kaufman understands what’s he trying to get across, which is the meaning of life. Von Trier seems to be throwing pasta on the wall just see what will stick. If grief is a part of nature, why don’t more animals grieve? Could it be that acceptance is the only to survive grief, if so, why does the movie end on the note that it does?

The last shot of the film brings me back to probably Von Trier’s most controversial element to the film which is how he views the battle of the sexes and about women specifally. It’s no secret that Von Trier allows chauvinism to play large parts of his movies, and Antichrist is probably his most frank look at the differences of sex. I can only imagine how tough this shoot was for Ms. Gainsbourg and Mr. Defoe as they are left without any defenses against each other or the story. In a better film, this would be groundbreaking. Unfortunately, Von Trier handicaps his actors by making his story more important than the characters or the actors playing said characters.

If only he knew what he was doing, these ideas along with the superb acting would have elevated cinema a few steps higher than ever seen before. This is a classic indie fallacy where a filmmaker believes too much in their idea that t hey sacrifice a deeper understanding to follow their own pursuits. And because it is not willing to take detours and look deeper into it’s own logic keeps this movie from working.

All in all, why is it called Antichrist? There have been so many people giving their own interpretation as to the meaning. I am not really sure myself, but I took apart the Anti and Christ and come to believe that the title for me means that that the filmmaker, along with his characters, believes that nature doesn’t subscribe to the noble ideas of Christ, thinking them naive and foolish. Redemption is not in this movie nor is faith in a better tomorrow. Nor for that matter, any hope for mankind.