#antichrist movie

[hesawifebeaterdanusethegun]

Currently watching Antichrist (2009)

[sc1entst]

just tried to watch antichrist as well. willem defoe’s entire dick was out and he was well endowed?? it was also a full blown PORN shot. i’ve never seen that in a movie. but i had to turn it off halfway through because i got too high and was genuinely scared😭😭😭

[sarisinema]

Antichrist: The Most Honest Film About Mental Ilness, Grief and "Nature" of Women

3.05.24 - Blog Post #10

Antichrist, the film Lars von Trier made when he was diagnosed with severe depression and dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky, was booed at the Cannes Film Festival and Trier was declared a misogynist. When I think about how the film, which is about a couple whose children have died and who go to a country house to grieve, managed to become one of the most unpopular films by Trier, who always portrays female characters in his films, I realize that the film is completely misunderstood. In 2009, before the current social media lynching culture was born, Trier was right to make this risky film, because today, cinephiles fed on films like Barbie or Poor Things under the guise of "feminist film" would probably crucify Trier. So why is this film so disturbing and offensive to feminists?

Antichrist, the evil brother of Solaris and Andrei Rublev, has a seemingly simple story. The movie was promoted as a horror movie before its release, and it already contains a lot of horror elements. The audience who went to the cinema, expecting a horror movie, must have been slapped left and right and realized that the film was more than a horror movie: just as Rublev was more than a historical drama or Solaris more than a science fiction film. Based on the horror movie cliché of going to a cabin in a deserted forest, the film opens with perhaps the best and most ambitious sequence in the history of cinema: Unnamed He and She, father and mother, are making love when their young son Nick, who managed to get out of his crib, falls through an open window. She is hospitalized after the death of his son and tries to recover with medication. Her husband is a psychologist. The man, who thinks that psychiatrists put his wife to drugs and argues that the grieving process should be overcome in a natural way without medication, takes her out of the hospital despite her objections. After leaving the hospital, the woman suffers from anxiety attacks, and she self-harms and feels fear and terror of unexplained origin. Realizing that she fears a forest called Eden, her husband forces her to go to Eden and face her fears.

Their son, Nick - Still from Antichrist, dir. Lars von Trier, 2009

As he tries to persuade her to leave the hospital, she says to him, “Yes, you are very smart, you must be smarter than a doctor, of course you know best.” She lashes out in a spiteful voice. In the movie, he completely suspends his own grieving process and takes on the role of her savior, completely disregarding her own wishes and feelings. The therapy he wants to do is all about the confrontation of fear and uncovering her subconscious, very Freudian. The treatment and attitude that the man confidently tries to apply, which will end in disaster, is a phenomenon that women in the medical world have had to face for years. The woman, who is in a state of mind that Freud would call hysterical, is going through an atypical grieving process. Before her hospitalization, the woman we see at her son's funeral is quite expressionless, then she faints and and is hospitalized. At home, she has anxiety attacks and harms herself. Although these are behaviors that can be seen in the grieving process, they are not common. The arrogant man, unwilling to accept that the woman needs medical help and that this is beyond him, rejects modern medicine and asks her to flush her antidepressants down the toilet. Although he is portrayed as the kind, self-sacrificing and thoughtful husband who tries to help her, he actually represents the masculine order that does not listen to women struggling with mental illness and difficulties, considering them “hysterical” and “abnormal”. The audience, who does not see these points, thinks that the man is portrayed as “good” and “smart” and declares Trier a misogynist. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite.

The evil things the man does under the name of helping the woman are countless. Taking the woman to a completely different environment when she was already at the beginning of the grieving process, tearing her away from her routine and taking away her medication support, the man then takes her to a deserted forest where she will only be alone with her own subconscious and pain. The fact that she faints at the funeral shows that she is unable to face anything, that her brain has shut down. If our brain is trying to make us forget something and focus on other things, it means that we are not in a position to handle the situation. Throwing a person into the lap of something they are not ready for does nothing but teach them harmful coping mechanisms, or drive them mad. This is where the arrogant and overconfident husband misses the point. Not every prescription fits every situation. Before they go to the forest, as they travel on the train, he asks her to close her eyes and imagine she is in the forest. We see the woman crossing a bridge in Eden. This bridge actually represents the transition from consciousness to the subconscious: Whatever binds her to reality is now left behind, Eden, nature, will now control her.

She crosses the bridge - Still from Antichrist dir. Lars von Trier, 2009

The most important point emphasized by feminists attacking the film is Trier's allegory of Woman-Nature-Evil-Devil. The woman, who is equated with nature, is shown as the enemy of reason, that is, of man and civilization, but this is not the focus. When they go to Eden, for example, the man keeps seeing "abnormalities" in nature: The shells sticking to his hands, the fox eating itself, the deer carrying the dead body of its half-born fawn remind us that everything we consider abnormal comes from nature. The fact that nature is described as horrible and cruel in the movie is actually the result of Trier's state of mind at the time, not because he wanted to vilify women. Suffering from severe depression, unable to control his own body, having panic attacks and depressive episodes, Trier wrote the script for Antichrist while taking heavy doses of Prozac. Because he was in major depression, everything seemed bad and meaningless, and Trier reflected his painful state of mind in the movie. In the film, Trier actually shows the helplessness of human beings in the face of mental illness and grief, because there is still no explanation for most cases of depression and mental illnesses other than childhood traumas - the more the rational side of the human being tries to find a reason for the situation, the more unmanageable the situation becomes. Some depressions really do come out of the blue and leave you helpless, and so does anxiety. In the movie, both men and women are helpless, nature is bad, harsh, and human beings, as a reflection of nature, suffer pain that they cannot help. I think the fact that this is analyzed through the woman in the movie is not an insult to the woman, it shows that her situation is even more difficult than men. The woman in the film was probably suffering from postpartum depression for years and unfortunately nobody realized it, not even her husband, the big-nosed psychologist.

Still from Antichrist dir. Lars von Trier, 2009

The movie parallels many of the teachings in the book Antichrist, from which it takes its title. In a chapter he adds at the end of the book, Nietzsche says: “Any transgression against nature is a sin. The most sinful man is the priest: he teaches transgression against nature. What is to be shown to the priest is not the reasons, but the asylum.” In the movie, the man is a priest, rejects modern medicine, separates the woman from her own nature, shames and punishes her for his instincts. He puts the woman at war with her own mind, with her own nature. Most mental illnesses are the result of fighting with one's own nature, which is in fact an animalistic. The people most oppressed and alienated from their nature by religion and social conventions are of course women, especially modern women. There is a flashback in the movie: The woman who wrote a thesis about women who were burned at the stake in the Middle Ages goes to Eden to complete her thesis, taking her young son with her. For some reason, her husband doesn't take care of the baby. The woman, who is supposed to be working, studying and being a great mother, slowly loses her mind and this loneliness goes unnoticed. The woman is afraid of being punished and at the same time carries a great guilt: In nature there are lions that eat their own cubs, cats that tear up yheir weak kittens, birds that throw chicks out of their nests - things that are unthinkable for humans. No matter what a woman does, she cannot exist: Even if she goes against her nature, even if she follows it, she is always doomed to feel guilty and incomplete. The fact that Trier reflects this in the movie doesn't mean that he shows women as hysterical maniacs, he just boldly shows those terrible impulses that no one wants to talk about.

The film not only offers different interpretations of mental illness, postpartum depression and atypical grief, but also focuses on religion-it is a great criticism of religion which is used to restrain society. We also see man's fight with his own nature, also the helplessness of human beings in the face of nature. The conflict between the logical side of us and the things that we cannot control: Our instincts, sexual desires, mental illnesses and aggression. Just like Solaris, Antichrist has a special place in my heart because, by disguising itself as another genre, it actually depicts the process of mourning and the guilt over a death and the most importantly, man's constant struggle with his own psyche. Also when it comes to the feminist backlash, contrary to the blinkered folks at Cannes, I see this movie as a criticism of men who put women in this grotesque state and then try to destroy or restrain them by burning them, destroying them, drugging them.

Because of the feminist backlash, I had to read the movie in terms of gender. May God protect Trier who gave us this masterpiece, from angry cinephile feminists. I hope in one day, we will become a society which is not this angry about the different depictions of the human condition in cinema.

[dailyflicks]

ANTICHRIST (2009) dir. Lars Von Trier MELANCHOLIA (2011) dir. Lars Von Trier

[dramasetter]

[666frames]

Fear No Evil (1981)

[cinematic-literature]

The Birdcage (1996) by Mike Nichols

Book title: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) by Walter Kaufmann

[escapismthroughfilm]

⋆˚｡⋆⋆˚The First Omen (2024) dir. Arkasha Stevenson⋆˚｡⋆ ⋆˚

[horror-aesthete]

Antichrist, 2009, dir. Lars von Trier

[weirdlookindog]

Carla Gravina in L'anticristo (1974)

[hallowjuice]

Seeing a Beetlebabes account that actively posts: :D

Seeing said person is insane and hates Alex Brightman to the point of writing several paragraphs about it, claiming all death threats are Alex's fault and that Alex thinks he created Beetlejuice: D:

[raven-ovs]

RITE HERE RITE NOW 🔥

[foxlecter]

Two more patches for my horror sweatshirt

[beastsovrevelation]

Now this made me think...

Yellowjackets Biblical AU. The Wilderness is the Devil, Natalie's the Antichrist, and Lottie's the False Prophet, and everyone else are in a satanic cult. The Unholy Trinity, of course, is an all-female trio in this.

I put how I think everyone joined in the tags, tell me what you think.

How did female Satan impregnate Nat's mom I have no idea (magic), but she was a sw, and it's the inversion that's sometimes used, Mary was a virgin, while the Antichrist's mother's a "prostitute".

[goryhorroor]

day 27 of horror: grief horror

[666frames]

Fear No Evil (1981)