Prepare yourself for the most unnerving, senses-searing cinematic experience of your life. It comes courtesy of Danish writer/director Lars von Trier, who’s never shied away from exploring the darkest aspects of the human psyche. This time, though, he’s surpassed everything he’s done before.

Von Trier’s bizarre and utterly harrowing stab at the horror genre stars The Science Of Sleep’s Charlotte Gainsbourg and Spider-Man’s Willem Dafoe as a married couple whose toddler son dies in a freak accident while they’re screwing. To deal with their grief, they retreat to a cabin deep in the woods. Once there, they’re plunged into a supernatural nightmare that threatens to consume them, body and soul.

From the feature’s opening frames, you know this isn’t cinema as entertainment, but filmmaking as unfettered emotion, alive with fury and fear. It’s as if von Trier, Dafoe and Gainsbourg have formed a disturbing trinity, with the intent to exceed the constraints of acceptability and test viewers’ limits to the max.

Apart from a brief episode with the child, this horrifying drama is a two-person show. Dafoe turns in a killer performance as the calculating shrink who gets put through the physical mill with agonising effect. However, it’s Gainsbourg who truly pulls out the stops, portraying the broken mother who takes control of her destiny in the most lurid and unexpected ways imaginable. She goes above and beyond the call of duty like no other actress before her – yes, she really is that incredible.

With regards to the genital mutilation sequences that made The Sun newspaper condemn the British Board Of Film Classification for passing the picture uncut, of course they’re shocking and outrageously intense. They’re supposed to be. Yet as in, for example, Gaspar Noé’s brutal rape/revenge thriller Irréversible, the extremity isn’t designed to titillate. Rather, von Trier wants to immerse audiences in his characters’ hell, to make us taste their suffering, but certainly not enjoy it. And with full penetrative sex and visceral violence that verges on faint-inducing and over-the-top graphic theatrics, Antichrist will both chill you to the core and have you squirming in your seat.

In fact, more than any other film that von Trier has made, Antichrist is proof that the ambitious and distinctive Danish director doesn’t give a flying fuck about commerciality or critical opinion. It is, quite frankly, a work of primal genius.

Billy Chainsaw

In Conclusion

A haunting masterpiece of horror that takes cinema beyond the realms of the extreme. It’ll leave you drained and dazed!