Before my trip to Cork I watched the film "Antichrist". It was recommended to me by a friend a long time ago, along with "Dear Zachary: A Letter To A Son About His Father", as movies I should that would disturb me. I managed to find "Dear Zachary" on the web, and found it to be very sad, but intriguing and shocking. In otherwords, I highly recommend it.
As for "Antichrist", I've heard mixed reviews on it, raging from terrible to good, but all I know that it was controversial at time of release. All I knew about the director was the Nazi comment controversy a few years ago. I never got around to watching it until recently (thank you Netflix). Not knowing what to expect, and for the sake of my curiosity, I decided to watch it, just to see what all the fuss was about.
WARNING: SPOILERS
108 minutes later.....
Okay, this movie is just.....well, weird. While it wasn't as shocking or disturbing as I was lead to believe, I can understand why this film courted much controversy. But overall, I just thought it was an odd movie. It certainly grabbed my attention from the start, with a graphic sex scene from Willem Dafoe and Charotte Gainsbourg (who I never heard of, but apparently starred in "I'm Not There", a pretentious semi-biopic of an artist I can never get into musically, but that's another story).
While this scene is playing to some opera piece, their infant son escapes from his cot, climbs up onto a windowsill, and falls to his death. I don't know what it says about me when the first thing that came to my mind was the song "Tears In Heaven". It's like my subconscious was making offensive joke, and my conscious self was not only offended, but ashamed of myself for making that connection.
With an opening scene that unsettling, the early scenes of the couple dealing with the grief are pretty heavy in tone. Their names are never revealed, and they turn out to be the main focus of the film, with no other supporting characters, except for the child at the very start. There were some background characters walking alongside the hearse soon after the beginning, and at first glance, I noticed that their faces were blurred. At the time I wasn't sure if I imagined that, as I never bothered to rewind and pause.
From this point on, the film was hard to watch. Not because of the depressing tone, but because the film was so boring. The first half is just filled with scenes of crying, psychobabble psychiatry, back and forth arguments, spontaneous bouts of nookie, and a drawn out hypnotic dream involving a cabin in a forest, where they decide to go as part of the healing process. The first half could easily have been trimmed down, were it not made as an arthouse type of film.
I don't mind long, drawn out scenes with minimal exposition, as its not the type of film that panders to the audience, and delivers everything on a plate in easily digestible portions. I understand that the film is setting the tone and atmosphere onscreen, even if some of the scenes just look odd for arts sake, which can be too much pretentiousness to stomach. But the problem I had with it was that the movie is painfully slow for the first half, to the point that I had to keep myself awake and not become easily distracted, just so I could see where this "controversial" film was going.
The director makes use of conventional horror film methods such as the suspenseful music in one scene, cutting to the next scene when you realise there's nothing scary around the corner. Granted this bait and switch method is an often used method that, when executed, can be effective. But again, this method is used in even the most cliched ridden of horror films. But here, it just comes off as distracting. It was just over the halfway mark when the film started to get that much weirder, when parts of the background begin to blur (again, I didn't rewind and pause to see if it was just my eyesight going, or my overactive imagination fighting boredom), and Willem Dafoe comes across a decomposing fox that says out loud "chaos reigns".
I found this scene very effective, as it began to make me feel unsettled while watching it, as it just comes out of nowhere, and is well executed. It is from this point where the film actually moves a gear with the questionable mental health and motivations of the wife, which then leads to the more violent scenes, especially those that fit right in with the "body horror" genre of scary movies. You either have to be of strong stomach or find gruesome scenes comical, if you don't find some of these scenes squeamish.
While the second half was, for want of a better term, more watchable, it was still a little vague as to how the wife came to be in her mindset, and the explanation for her actions. I guess that's where the pretentiousness factor comes into play and you have to think for yourself, but sometimes I wonder if by trying to be vague, is the film showing off its intelligence, or is it trying to be arty for the sake of being arty? And the blurred out faces that I mentioned before show up again, and I'm sure there's something symbolic behind it, but I don't know, and maybe I don't care. While you can feel a little stupid for not "getting" these types of films, at the same time, maybe the reason you don't "get it" is because, when you strip everything away and analyze it, maybe there's noting to "get" in the first place?
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| Especially when it comes to scenes like this. |
Verdict?
I should point out that when I watched this, I was quite tired and decided to watch a film before heading to bed. While it may not be the best state to watch this, I would like to think that if I was wide awake and energetic, I'd still find the film a drag at the beginning. As I write this, I'm still trying to figure out whether I liked it or not. But for now, my opinion is that the movie was pretty good, but could have been better if the first half had better pacing and editing.
It did have that outworldly feel to it, similar to the feeling I get when watching any David Lynch movie I've seen. The visuals are surreal, the background score gives it a haunting feel (even if it is minimal), and it is a challenge to understand the actual story, it does leave itself to be open for interpretation. But unlike Lynch, the visuals are more a mixture of the supernatural interacting with reality, as opposed to.....well, whatever comes out of the head of David Lynch. Plus, the film makes a little more sense, in that you don't need a "cheat sheet" (as with "Mulholland Drive") to understand what was going on, and the viewer is able to come up with their own educated interpretation.
While it was interesting to watch, in terms of understanding the different viewpoints of critics and people I know, in terms of gore, violence, story and controversy. I get the feeling that I need to watch it again so I can have a better opinion or appreciation for it. However, it is by no means the most shocking and disturbing film I've seen. That title goes to "A Serbian Film", which despite the fact that I thought was very good and powerful in its execution, I would have no intention of watching again, due to the nature of the film.
Last Minute Research
Normally I don't do that much research into films I haven't seen, as I want to write from the perspective of someone who never watched it in the first place. But I was intrigued to look up a few things from the online oracle that is Wikipedia, and was interested by a few things:
- There are different cuts of the film, and from what I gather, I saw the uncut version. Once again, thank you Netflix.
- The director made this film while suffering from an extreme bout of depression. Maybe next time I see this film, I would keep that in mind. But then again, I'm sure this fact wouldn't change my opinion of it.
- The original ending for the film had to be rewritten as one of the executive producers gave the plot away. So I could forgive the director for a slight lack of direction in this case.
- Eva Green was meant to play the female lead, but her agents wouldn't allow her.
Maybe it's just personal opinion here, but I would have preferred Eva Green to Charlotte Gainsbourg, in terms of acting ability. I know Gainsbourg won a few awards for her performance, but I just found her annoying. Her accent was grating to my ears, I wasn't that convinced by her performance, and she's not particularly good looking.
Granted that's an unfair comment, albeit shallow, and for a role such as this, it would be hard to attract a "Hollywood starlet" to take on the role. But with her body frame she looks anorexic and sickly. With a scene that involves the female character masturbating in the nude by a tree, it looks more strangely disturbing than strangely erotic. Now if it was Eva Green masturbating by a tree.....
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| .....yeah I think I'll just wrap up this article now. |
And on a final note.....
Influenced by the title of the film, I shall post the entire "Antichrist Superstar" album by Marilyn Manson. While I had heard other heavy artists outside of the Indie/Britpop music scene I was into at the time, this was the album that changed my musical taste forever. Thanks to Marilyn Manson and producer Trent Reznor, I changed from an Oasis fanatic to something more darker. And I have no regrets either.
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