Antichrist

Saw Antichrist. It was a sumptuously grotesque film. It opens with a male therapist having sex with his wife (who has some unspecified, grad-studentish, academic position.) While they're going at it, their toddler son falls out a window to his death. The wife takes the accident especially hard and most of the film revolves around her therapy at the hands of her super-analytical husband.

The falling-out-the-window/sex scene is shot in black and white, with slow-motion and operatic background music. It seems like the height of sophistication. Later in the film, we retreat further and further from this sophistication. The wife begins suffering from anxiety attacks, in her grief, and has a sort of reverse pregnancy. First she is coached on how to breathe to stave off the attacks, a few nights later she starts vomiting and lastly they have strange pale sex. As she progresses, she gets worse and worse, eventually developing a phobia of nature. The therapist husband declares that they must go back to a cabin (called Eden, of course. The religious symbolism comes thick and fast.) to confront her fear of nature (again, the retreat from civilization. Later still in the movie, things get more brutish.)

As anyone who's seen the preview knows, the film is supposed to be very morbid and off-putting. In this the film succeeded for me, though its take on the infernal is of a Brueghelian sort. It's not exactly scary, more eerie and surreal. The husband often will stumble upon grotesque tableaux: a deer with a fetus half-way outside of it, a fox which appears to be eating its own stomach. The wife will often mumble ominous lines: "darkness comes early around here." "Nature is Satan's church." There's a few gory scenes (I invite you to peruse the plot keywords on imdb,) but clearly these are not supposed to be the main source of your discomfort. You have to buy into the morbidity a bit to make it work or it will all seem a bit melodramatic and silly. I was willing to do this, but I think many critics were not. I suspect that if I had seen this with my sarcastic friends, the film would not have held up so well.

The film eventually reveals that the nature the wife is terrified of is specifically human nature and, even more specifically, her own human nature. The film unfortunately indulges in some magical nonsense (albeit very stylish nonsense) near the end. In fact, the very ending of the film left me completely bewildered. The film felt strongest to me on the train to the cabin. You can't exactly tell what's going on but it's weird and interesting.