It also earned the Nordic Council Film Prize for best Nordic film, and the European Film Award for best cinematography.The guitarist was bouncing his brother’s 2-year-old daughter on his lap and extolling the values of a nutritious diet the night we chatted backstage in Salt Lake City in 1982. It is an award-winner. Gainsbourg won the 2009 Cannes Film Festival’s award for Best Actress. Is It Good? The man stands alone in the wilderness. Love, grief, pain, sex, death and chaos! We’ll see that love, hate and fear of abandonment are all intertwined. One may try to assess what is going on, but it would be in defiance of those two words: Chaos reigns. Acorns strikes the metal cabin roof at regular intervals, ticks cover the man’s hand upon waking, and he encounters what I now call the “Chaos Reigns Fox.”Īll of these elements grow and the story becomes a greater nightmare with each passing minute. Meanwhile, nature itself takes on more sinister dimensions.
This is where the movie gets weirder and weirder, as she increasingly blends her grief with pain and forceful sex. Why else would we spend so much time trying to control it? Chaos Reigns Some new constellations? (via Nordisk Film Dist.)
Despite our attempts to defy it, it seems our fear of nature is always still there, waiting, lurking. In the grander sense, man often alienates himself from nature, while imagining he is conquering it (though nature is all, so conquering nature means conquering one’s self as well). What is out there? We do not know until it’s seen. A mere snap of a twig can make the heart race faster. Nevertheless, anyone who’s walked the woods at night knows they can take on different, more sinister dimensions. At first glance, a fear of the woods sounds almost silly. Of course, the wooded area is called “Eden,” which has some religious connotations to it. It’s implied, then, that something in the woods may have driven a fear into her, even before her child’s death. Interestingly, although she fears the woods by this point, the previous summer she resided in a cabin, where she developed her thesis on the topic of gynocide (or the societal murder of women and girls). To help assuage her fears, he decides upon “exposure therapy” - that is, bringing her into the woods so she can face her fears directly. In the process, it is revealed that she has developed a fear of “the woods,” or nature (though the movie doesn’t mention it, this fear is variously called hylophobia, dendrophobia or xylophobia). Her husband (Willem Dafoe), an unnamed therapist, does his best to help her, using his profession as a guide. (via Nordisk Film Dist.)Īs one might expect, this chapter deals with the grief of the parents - particularly the unnamed mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who struggles to move beyond the tragedy. Let’s examine it (without spoiling much), shall we? Grief Lost in the wilderness. Hell, it’s one of the few movies that takes so-called “torture porn” to a transcendent level. I actually like that it’s a film of many moods, styles and messages.
Still, despite all that, the movie has gained praise, and I think it deserves some. However, it should be noted that this movie definitely ventures into surrealistic horror terrain, which creates yet another layer of potential criticism and condemnation. Many people would regard it instantly as part of a snooty, pretentious, artsy-fartsy shock value machine.
As you can already tell, Antichrist is a movie bound for controversy.