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In short, Antichrist is about a psychiatrist, played by Willem Dafoe, who
decide to take his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourgh, to the one place
she fears the most, to help her overcome the grief of their son's accidental
death. That place is Eden Forrest, where they have a small cabin, where she
once wrote a thesis about the persecution of witches in the middle ages.
While trying to understand why such tragedy could happen to them, the couple
opens their eyes to the possibility that the nature of the world is to be
evil. And more so, that the nature of humans is evil. And without giving
away too much, I can tell you that her thesis comes to play a major part in
their discovering. And although this was the first screening of Antichrist
ever, before any effects, before its initial editing was supposed to end,
before any major sound-editing and so on, Lars von Trier's way of showing
the evils of nature was extremely beautiful. Never has anything this
gruesome been shown in such a poetic way. A beauty I haven't seen in a von
Trier movie since his Europe trilogy. But the movie was also a
tour-de-madman, into von Triers viewpoint on the human nature. Although the
style was very atypical of late von Trier and very atypical of early von
Trier, it sort of mixed the two von Triers, and everything on screen
SCREAMED von Trier. Already in the six minute opening sequence of the movie,
which was filmed with a high speed camera and shown in super slow motion,
black and white images, to opera music, the movie denied itself of any
chances of getting an MPAA rating less than NC-17.

Initially being just another movie about someone going to a cabin far from
civilization and then coming in contact with something supernatural, Trier
excels and makes it a beautifully poetic movie, with so much written between
the lines that I am not going to pretend that I fully understood it all
after this first viewing - much like the before-mentioned The Idiots.
Luckily Antichrist also worked on its own terms as a horror movie, and while
it didn't scare me as much as I hoped it would, it made me physically ill,
due to gruesome content that borderlines gore, except it seems to artsy to
be allowed such a label. But I mean gruesome!! Take Hostel and mix it with
The Piano Teacher, and you're close to an idea of what you have in store.
And I am positive that the final edit, and the special effects and sound
departments will do the trick, and the fright-factor will be upped for the
final cut. In all circumstances, this is a movie to look forward to, if only
for the tour-de-madman into the fucked up mind of von Trier that will leave
you shaking your head in disbelief of what you are witnessing - even if you're
a LvT fan, who expects the unexpected.

Antichrist is a brilliant mixture of the old Trier and the new Trier.
Intensely beautiful pictures that speaks more than a thousand words, but
also content and subtext that speak a million words of their own. I
seriously doubt this film will make him a household name, but I have hopes
that this will be one of his biggest hits. The gore alone will make it a hit
with certain audiences, but still the story has so much depth and finesse,
that it could be a contender for some major awards.

Anyways, I can't wait to see it again.

Happy new years from this anonymous Dane.