Posted by finn mccool on November 4, 2009, 11:14:05, in reply to "Anti-Christ"
I've seen it, but I'm too lazy to write at lenght about it. It's good, honest work but not entirely successful cinematically. Von Trier suffers from depression, and that is a mean, violent thing, not a romantic melancholy, and the nightmares that come to a person suffering from it are unlikely to be pretty. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably holding back the aggression rather than pushing it farther.
Here's one idea. Horror as a film genre often deals with people's irrational fears coming true and the horror of losing one's mind, and to me Antichrist has the same idea from the point of view of depression. I'd point to the violence inherent in the way the husband relates to the wife by gently asking her to face her darkness and talking her out of taking her medication, and how that must be perceived by the one being asked to embrace hell as opposed to the ignorant outsider. The problem is that she doesn't have much strength of will left. She knows that he doesn't understand, she can feel the threat and is terrified of giving in to the chaos, but she is too weak help her situation. All she can do is hold it back until she is no longer able to. The result is that both she and her reasonable husband finally come face to face with the reality of her poor, black soul, and this happens with a desperate, furious, ecstatic release, and the perverse pleasure of letting out that which she has had to live with alone, of showing it and making it real to the man who was pushing her, advising her, narrating to her about what was going on inside her. So the horror story is that the logic of depression turns out to be stronger, truer, more real, more vivid, more concrete than the shadowy, distant, almost unintelligible logic of rational therapy, which might be a fear a depressed person has.
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