Anti Christ - Review

There has been no other movie featured at the IFFK that I so strongly feel against, yet, it is the one movie that has seemed to impress itself upon my memory, visually.

With William Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in a passionate love-making scene right at the opening the movie further grew complex.

So, in their passionate moment both Dafoe and Gainsbourg tend to not notice their toddler crawling towards the window and falling right out of it with arms wide open. Almost like infant Jesus pictures are shown. But a horrendous moment as with a child falling out of the window and dying is drowned in the extremely soft and passionate opera with the slight tinkling of bells to make the snow flakes appear magical.

The whole scene even in its aesthetic quality gives this sense of uneasiness that prevails throughout the movie.

As it comes to the knowledge of the couple that their child has died, the woman can stand the shock, the man as a part of her treatment and being a psychologist takes her to this place they call Eden. An idea as opposed to the biblical idea of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the garden of Eden for trespassing in desire to acquire knowledge.

Further I notice the reoccurring theme of dead new-borns. First the human child, then a bird falling of the tree and a deer kid still half in its mother being born dead.

The scenes have such powerfully horrific imagery I feel. Too much death, lot of pain. It’s even excruciating to watch.

At this place, the forest Eden, the woman used to come earlier to work on her project about Genocides, emphasized more by the many hands that are seen under the tree where the man and woman make love.

As opposed to the Garden of Eden where creation took place. Is the movie then at a level of a questioning of the whole idea of creation? For later in the movie, dissatisfied as she is and deprived of sex, the woman first resorts to self satisfaction and then decides to entirely do away with the sex organs of both the man and herself by mutilation, almost as if questioning the whole idea of reproduction and progeny.

Altogether, I think the movie is very suffocation and tortures my psyche. The camera is so brilliantly made the frames look artistically very appealing with added effect to the story but i wouldn't want to watch the movie again.

Evangeline