ANTICHRIST is a film basically about a couple who tries to help each other recover mentally and emotionally after the death of their only baby son in a freak accident- he jumped off the window several floors below towards the ground. The story seems ordinary enough except of course for the death of the baby and the carelessness of his parents. But this event "tsunami-es" into a more disturbing experience for the couple and results in the demise of one half of the partnership. This is how the movie becomes more powerful and takes on a meaning - jumping off the silver screen unlike any other film I've seen.
Their child has perished because of their negligence and this halts the wife's daily existence. She is in deep emotional pain and wants to physically sympathize with her son's demise. The husband decides to take on a very drastic form of therapy for his partner's sanity. He exposes his wife to her greatest fear, that of dwelling for a while in a cabin which holds a significance or a lack of it for her. Called Eden, it is a house deep in the woods where she stayed in to write her thesis on gynocide while at the same time spending private moments with her son, Nic.
He finds scrawlings and images on the walls of the attic in the cabin which disturb him. Reading her notes eventually has him concluding that her studies on witchhunts and the mass murder of women throughout history has had a profound effect on her being. This feeling is also convoluted by feelings of self-blame and guilt on her part too. women are inherently evil has become an adage too close to real life than he or she would have wanted.
He gets around to reading the autopsy report on his son's death which he actually hid in an effort to help with her therapy. His son had some abnormality to the structure of his feet. Poring on photographs of his son he found in the toolshed led him to find out that she intentionally made him wear his boots on the wrong feet all the time. Like an act stemming from her sympathizing with the misogynistic acts committed by people throughout history. I know it's preposterous to connect the incorrect tying up of her son's shoelaces to such an event but it may not be far off from being the truth. This realization leaves him reeling with many bad thoughts about her.
The wife catches on to her husband's sudden behavioral change and quickly threatens him physically. The last couple of moments of the movie revolve around the graphic display of blood, gore and severed body parts which leave me and my companion nauseous from the proximity of the screen to our faces. The wife's mental derangement results in her severing her own clitoris and earlier her husband's penis. Her death is brought about by her husband dispassionately squeezing the life out of her in an act of defense and perhaps mercy. Mercy because he does not want her to suffer any more and to inflict pain on herself and others.
The film is very powerful and there are many instances which I can't translate into words which are magnetic and hypnotic. The slow movements of the characters in the PROLOGUE and the almost anthropomorphistic manner of the animals in the film are very striking and are most note-worthy. The EPILOGUE is also a tremendously striking scene with the scores of women clambering up a hill in an arcane act of communal effort or group struggle. Once again symbolism plays an important role in making many of events in the motion picture stand out and UNDERSTOOD.
This film is more or less the kind which make me stretch my comfort zone of mere appreciation of ordinary 1.5 hour flicks. And it's nice because I know that when I do something different I most often learn something from it!
1 comment:
Pretty interesting movie... a bit slow... but the character and story build up is engrossing.
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