Image © Artificial Eye
The film in question is Antichrist, the latest critic-baiting drama from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, which arrives in UK cinemas two months on from its controversy-courting world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
For those who take note of these things, the gruesome self-mutilation that Antichrist ends on may well be one of the most shocking images ever caught on celluloid. It may also be the most banal, coming at the close of a yawningly pretentious, frequently absurd psycho-thriller one suspects von Trier sees as an extended in-joke.
It is sure to have the reviewers up in arms, particularly those who regard themselves as guardians of the nation’s moral health. The vast majority of the cinema-going public, however, will be wholly unmoved, being as likely to check out a von Trier work as a subtitled Polish rom-com or a three-hour Russian war epic.
They might, though, be swayed to see a gratuitous Gorno like the aforementioned Saw or Hostel, films that received a far greater distribution than Antichrist will and which, in this pundit’s opinion, are far more distasteful and damaging. For all its faults, von Trier’s film does at least make its baroque excesses the festering issue of a diseased, deranged world, a logical result of the guilt, shame and denial its protagonists – played, it has to be said, with unstinting courage and commitment by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg – are going through. Recent Hollywood horrors, however, have served up dismemberment, laceration and the casual infliction of distress as a form of entertainment, to be lapped up and wallowed in with a bucket of popcorn and a gallon of Coke.
When leavened with a degree of humour or a sprinkling of satire – the sort you’ll find in a David Cronenberg or Paul Verhoeven film, for example – it is possible to view wanton violence against the human form in a different, more forgiving light. Sadism for sadism’s sake, alas, sullies both the filmmaker and the audience, pandering as it does to the basest impulses of both parties. It also locks the former into a ghoulish, self-perpetuating bout of one-upmanship that requires each successive horror picture to top the last with ever more grisly simulations.
Before Antichrist French indie Martyrs set some kind of record in this regard, featuring an extended sequence of brutal victimisation that climaxed with a young woman being skinned alive. There was also Captivity, which found Elisha Cuthbert of 24 fame being forced to ingest a milkshake of liquidised body parts, not to mention a recent remake of Last House on the Left that showed a head exploding in a microwave.
From the shower scene in Psycho to the razor-eyeball interface of Un Chien Andalou, the cinema has a habit of making our nightmares flesh and finding new ways to appal us. The current crop of shockmeisters, though, are hardly the successors to Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock. Instead they’re arrested adolescents, out to dismay and sicken for no other reason than the fact they can. Say what you like about Lars von Trier, but at least you sense there is a method to his madness; hell, there might even by artistry if the arresting black-and-white intro is anything to go by. Given the choice, I’ll take him over Eli Roth any day of the week.
