Antichrist

Sex appears to be at the core of the film Antichrist which I found depressing and incomprehensible yet according to Dr Mark Kermode who introduced the Film Four Extreme season of films most of which I missed this is a major film. The film shocked audiences because of an opening sequence where penetrative intercourse between married adults is shown in close up.

While this is happening their preschool child has opened his bedroom window and is amazed with the falling snow and which is covering the ground. He stretches out to catch the snow and falls to his death. His mother never recovers.

In the first part of the film Chapter one called Grief she moves to an establishment for therapy after failing to respond to psychiatric drugs. The sequence ends with a vision, dream, hallucination in which her husband encounters a dear without fear of him and then he finds a dead fawn in hanging from the womb.

Chapter two is Pain and fear, panic and grief overwhelm the woman. The husband is also the subject of frightening and unpleasant experiences encountering a disembowelling fox which utters “chaos reigns“.

Chapter three is Despair. She wants him to beat her. During sex in the woods roots turn to hands emerging from the soil. The child appears to have had deformed feet at the time of its death and husband finds photos of the child wearing boots on the wrong feet. He becomes even more concerned about the behaviour past and present of his wife, she crushes his testicles.

Chapter four the Three Beggars. Husband asks if his wife wants to kill him. She says not yet, but when the Three beggars arrive someone must die. There is a flashback to the prologue in which she sees what a child is doing and does not act to prevent his fall. She mutilates herself while masturbating. She attempts to kill her husband but he strangles her instead and burns her body on a funeral pyre.

There is an epilogue in which he is returning to cabin eating berries. From the top of the hill he sees he blurred faces if hundreds of women moving towards him. Sad and unpleasant.



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