Lars Von Trier
Antichrist

In the collective imagination, nature is painted as the giver of life; in the film, it is the undisputed protagonist and represents evil with its unsettling shadows, the niches among the roots, the rustling in the bushes, its animals harbingers of bad news.

A couple, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, is struggling with the premature death of their firstborn; he, a psychiatrist, tries to provide therapy to his wife who, after the event, is bewildered and prone to continuous panic and anxiety attacks, marking the difficult journey of coming to terms with grief.

Image: Sex in detail, black and white, mature porn.

The prologue opens with an explicit sex scene, in slow motion, while the notes of "Lascia Che Io Pianga" by Handel play. Meanwhile, as the parents indulge, the child leans too far out of the window and falls to the ground.

The solution for him seems to be leaving their city home, spending a few days in their country house, "Eden," which throughout the film becomes a gestational place for the characters’ development. Over time, the situation becomes increasingly harsh, and the possibilities for a happy ending are minimal. Very soon, indeed, the signs of nature, the small clues he gathers as he tries to understand where his wife's anxiety state is coming from, become the prelude to the progressive emergence of chaos, madness, horror, which will definitively change the viewer's imagination and their bureaucratic security.

Image: Women, pandemonium, and genocide.

Self-flagellating foxes and pregnant doe.

The film cannot be classified into a specific genre section, as it contains multiple genres within itself, from psychological horror, to the Lynchian dream sphere, to snuff-movie-porno-torture, a game that pervades the entire film, intrinsic with human degeneration until unintended parody.

Von Trier lays bare all his most recondite images of terror, his most impressive nightmares, and if the theater as Antonin Artaud said had to be bloody and inhuman like dreams, the dreams and the screenplay produced represent all that is most diabolical and inhuman that exists and what can be put into action by a mind disturbed by auto-amputation of reproductive organs, to reach evil for evil's sake.

A film that scandalizes the Cannes festival, a German-Danish-French co-production, divided into anti-boredom chapters, leaves you with chills for an hour and forty, denying your mind imagination, all to be seen with one's own eyes, through the artificial use of a digital camera "one red camera" with predominantly original shots, a modern Horror in the good sense of the term, leaving behind the Hays codes and various Andreotti censorships.

Image: Iconography of the antichrist. Nature as the last bastion of truth.

For me, fewer cinematic gimmicks and more gritty psycho-traumatological horror.

It's left to you to find out if they managed to save their marriage...