Antichrist and Chapters
Prologue: With background music “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s Rinaldo (1711). A couple’s young son, Nick, falls from a window to his death on the snowy ground below while his parents (who remain unnamed throughout the film) passionately make love.
Chapter One: Grief: During Nick’s funeral, the wife collapses. The other mourners gather around her, their faces blurred. Spending the next month in the hospital, in and out of consciousness and with little concept of time, she awakens crippled with grief. Her husband, a therapist, is skeptical of the psychiatric care she is receiving and takes it upon himself to treat her with psychotherapy.
After a less-than-fruitful period at home, during which she tries to free herself from the pain of her child’s death and dependence on psychiatric drugs, he decides to try exposure therapy. In an isolated cabin in the woods (appropriately called Eden) where she spent time with Nick the previous summer while writing a thesis on gynocide, he learns that her greatest fear centers on the structure and the surrounding vegetation. During the journey to Eden, while she sleeps, he encounters a deer which shows no fear of him. As the deer turns to leave he sees a dead fawn hanging halfway out of the womb.
Chapter Two: Pain (Chaos Reigns): The couple continue towards the cabin. Upon encountering a footbridge, she is overcome with fear. She hesitates and then sprints across the bridge and into the woods, leaving him to follow after her. During sessions of psychotherapy she becomes increasingly grief stricken and manic. The environment surrounding the cabin also becomes increasingly sinister. As acorns pelt the cabin like rapid gunfire, he awakens to find his hand covered in swollen ticks, and at the conclusion of this chapter he comes across a self-disemboweling fox which utters the words “chaos reigns.”
Chapter Three: Despair (Gynocide): He finds his wife’s thesis studies: pictures of witch-hunts and a scrapbook filled with articles and notes on misogynist topics. Her writing becomes more frantic and illegible as the pages go on. It is revealed that, while writing her thesis, she came to believe that all women are inherently evil. He is repulsed by this and reproaches her for buying into the gynocidal beliefs she had originally set out to criticize. She asks him to hit her during sex. At first he resists, but when she flees into the woods and begins masturbating underneath a large tree he chases after her and half-heartedly complies.
While they make love numerous hands are seen emerging from the roots of the tree. He goes on to study Nick’s autopsy report which states the bones in both of the child’s feet were oddly deformed. The doctors at the time did not assign any importance to this fact as it was unrelated to the child’s death. Finding numerous photographs of Nick in which his boots are on the wrong feet, he becomes increasingly agitated. This bizarre revelation has sinister undertones regarding his wife, who had been alone with the boy at the time the pictures were taken.
At this moment she attacks him and accuses him of planning to leave her. She disrobes, mounts him, and then unexpectedly crushes his testicles with a block of wood. While he is unconscious from the pain, she goes on to masturbate him until he orgasms, ejaculating blood. Then, to prevent him from leaving, she drills a hole through his leg and bolts a heavy grindstone through the wound.
She tosses the wrench she used under the cabin where he cannot find it. He wakes up, finds himself alone, and drags himself outside. He hears her screaming for him, so he drags himself into a foxhole to hide. As she searches for him he finds a crow buried alive in the foxhole. The crow starts cawing loudly and repetitively, which lets her find his hiding spot. He beats the crow over and over, but it will not die. She finds him and tries to pull him out. She is unsuccessful and goes on to retrieve a shovel to inflict more pain while he lies in the fox hole, now partially buried alive.
Chapter Four: The Three Beggars: Several hours pass. Night falls, and she apologizes to him, weeping profusely. She tries to find the wrench to unbolt the grindstone, but cannot locate it. With a joint effort they are able to drag him back inside the cabin. He asks her if she wanted to kill him and she answers “not yet”, adding cryptically that “when the three beggars arrive someone must die.”
There is a flashback to an alternate view of the prologue in which she sees what was about to happen to Nick and does not act. It is unclear whether this is meant to be reality or merely an imagined vision symptomatic of extreme guilt. She then takes a pair of scissors and severs her clitoris while masturbating, letting out a tortured scream. During the night the couple are visited by the crow, the deer, and the fox. Hail beats against the roof of the cabin. Earlier it had been revealed that women in Ratisbon had been accused of witchcraft and had been known to have the power to summon hailstorms.
The crow is heard making the same cawing sound beneath the floorboards of the cabin. Breaking through the floor he frees the bird and discovers the wrench. At this moment she stabs him in the back with a pair of scissors, but he is still able to remove the grindstone. She stops fighting him after noticing a change of look in his eyes. He strangles her to death and burns her body on a funeral pyre outside the cabin.
Epilogue: With background music again from Lascia ch’io pianga, he makes his way from the cabin, eating wild berries, as the three beggars look on. Upon reaching the top of a hill he looks down to see hundreds of women ascending towards him, their faces blurred.
Antichrist (2009)
Directed by: Lars von Trier
Starring by: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Screenplay by: Anders Thomas Jensen
Production Design by: Karl Júlíusson
Cinematography by: Anthony Dod Mantle
Film Editing by: Åsa Mossberg, Anders Refn
Costume Design by: Frauke Firl
Art Direction by: Tim Pannen
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: October 16, 2009
Visits: 280
