A most cleverly calculated scandal, Antichrist is – as its name suggests – designed to be received as the coming of the beast. Is Lars von Trier’s crazy whatsit intended as a joke, or is it a sincere meditation on the dissolution of a marriage? Maybe a little of each? At the very least, the movie deserves credit for betraying no clues of how it should be processed. I’ve seen it twice, and in both cases viewers seemed confused about whether to laugh or applaud.

But that’s par for the course for von Trier. In one sense, the movie can be seen as an inversion of the director’s Breaking the Waves: both films are about a husband trying to control his wife’s sexuality after a tragedy. In Waves, the husband’s efforts lead to salvation; in the second – well, see title. After the accidental death of their baby son, who, to the accompaniment of Handel, falls out a window while his parents are having sex, a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to a woodland cabin to mourn. From there, the movie takes an increasingly supernatural tack, but as weird as it gets – with rock showers, a talking fox, nasty uses of home tool kits – its true subject is Gainsbourg’s character’s grief, along with Dafoe’s less-than-sympathetic response.

Von Trier’s dedication of the film to Andrei Tarkovsky is at once laughable and understandable. (In its muddy marshes and blend of landscape and mindscape, the movie sometimes recalls Stalker.) If you can stomach it – and be advised that it features graphic violence performed in surgical close-up – Antichrist is that rarest of rarities: a film that feels utterly new.

Ben Kenigsberg

From Time Out Chicago

Dir Lars von Trier, Category III, 104 mins, Limited release starting July 8