Antichrist (2009)

It took me a long time to get in the mindset to watch this movie, after all I had read about it.  Then one night, I was super-depressed about my wedding, drank wine, and decided I could face this flick.

Antichrist is from Denmark director Lars Van Treir, but is very French horror-esque in it's emotion and intensity.  Van Trier tackled it directly after a long bout of depression and this is exhibited in the film.

The movie addresses a husband and wife (never named) and their child.  While they are having sex all over the house, their toddler wakes up, explores, and falls out the window to his death. The husband, a therapist, grieves and moves on, but the wife is having a lot of difficulty.  She is very depressed and the husband feels she is overmedicated.  He decides to take her psychological care into his own hands.

This care isn't going so well as the wife is trying to distract herself with continuous and sometimes violent sex.  In an effort to make the wife face her fears, the husband brings her to a cabin where they spent their summer while she worked on a thesis.  However, this appears to make things worse.   They keep seeing weird animals and signs and the wife is sinking deeper into her depression.  Meanwhile, the husband finds the coroner's report on their son, which shows his feet as being deformed.  Further investigation yields numerous pictures of the boy with his shoes on the wrong feet.

Things all go downhill after this as the wife seriously loses it and becomes increasingly violent towards the husband.  There's more creepy imagery and creatures and boy, this movie was trippy.  I found this movie to be interesting, although I can't necessarily say I "liked" it.  It was very avant-garde and symbolical with heavy messages about sex and death.  The sex and violence are both quite graphic, as there's full frontal of both male and female as well as severing of sexual organs.

I'd only check this out with an open mind and a couple of drinks.



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