In 2006, Lars von Trier was hospitalised for depression and started writing Antichrist, the first film in what would become known as his “Depression Trilogy.” (Melancholia followed in 2011, and Nymphomaniac in 2013). 

Filmed in 40 days on a 4K digital camera, Antichrist was the first of LvT’s films to be shot entirely in Germany and was heavily influenced by horror – the director had watched the Japanese horror films Ring and Dark Water, although he is reluctant to describe Antichrist as a horror film (yet it is often labelled as art horror or psychological horror). At the same time, Von Trier had watched a documentary about European forests which detailed the violence of nature, and how these beautiful places are dark landscapes of pain. For LvT, nature “represents pure Hell,” yet people are still content to hang paintings of it in their homes. 

Antichrist is about a couple, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg — credited as “He” and “She” — who retreat to the woods, or Eden, after the tragic accidental death of their infant son. The tragedy plays out in a breath-taking prologue, or opening sequence, as the couple are having sex in their home. The powerful black and white scene has no dialogue but is scored to Lascia Ch’io Pianga from Handel’s opera Rinaldo (the translation of Lascia Ch’io Pianga is “let me weep.”) Von Trier would use the aria again in Nymphomaniac (which starred Gainsbourg and featured Dafoe in Vol. 2). 

After “She” collapses at the funeral and spends a month in hospital under the diagnoses of atypical grief, “He” — a therapist with a distrust of psychoanalysis — has his wife discharged from hospital and takes it upon himself to counsel her himself (clearly a bad idea for a greiving father). His course of action is exposure therapy — making her confront her greatest fears to overcome her grief — and seeing as her second greatest fear is nature, they hike to the cabin in the woods where she had spent the previous summer with their son writing her since abandoned thesis. But through this journey of mourning, something wild and sinister is unleashed, and the film powerfully explores themes including sexual violence, sadomasochism, and the untamed wild power of nature.

There is also, obviously, a religious angle, “He” and “She” / Adam and Eve —but whatever your interpretation, it is a film rooted in mourning and despair.

Eva Green had been originally approached for the lead, and despite her determination to do the film, her agents would not permit it. In von Trier’s words, “Charlotte came in and said, ‘I’m dying to get the part no matter what.’ So I think it was a decision she made very early and she stuck to it. We had no problems whatsoever.” Gainsbourg has said she knew little of von Trier before their first meeting, although she knew his films and was highly anxious before they met in person. She was also concerned about the film’s more emotional sequences because LvT’s leads often go to very dark, frequently violent and/or intense places. She was also worried about depicting her character’s panic attacks and anxiety as she had experienced them herself.

Dafoe had previously worked with von Trier in 2005’s Manderlay, and had contacted the director to ask what he was working on around the time Antichrist was in its infancy. Of the role, Dafoe said, “I think the dark stuff, the unspoken stuff is more potent for an actor. It’s the stuff we don’t talk about, so if you have the opportunity to apply yourself to that stuff in a playful, creative way, yes, I’m attracted to it.” 

Antichrist, as is the pattern with LvT’s films, polarised its audience when it premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival — there were walkouts and a handful of fainters. When questioned at the film’s press conference, von Trier commented that he had no need to justify the film because the audience were his guests and “not the other way around,” and claimed to be the best director in the world. The ecumenical jury at the Cannes festival gave the film a special “anti-award,” declaring Antichrist “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world,” yet Charlotte Gainsbourg still won the festival’s award for Best Actress.

In a tragic line from the film to Gainsbourg’s personal life, her sister, the British fashion photographer Jane Barry, whose work appeared in numerous commercial magazines and newspapers (including Vogue and The Sunday Times Magazine), as well as collaborations with their mother (the late Jane Birkin) and sisters, died as a result of a fall from her fourth-floor apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on 11 December 2013. So here you have a very sad connection to the film. Some of the images and Barry’s death may also remind you of the murder of artist Ana Mendieta.

Antichrist is a viewing experiences that stays with you. Numerous friends and acquaintances say once watched, they don’t need to watch it again for maybe a decade — or ever again — much like Gaspar Noé’s 2002 Irrévervisble (which starred Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci). Incidentally, there is another link to Noé, and something we can connect to the witch-hunts mentioned in Antichrist. In 2019, Gainsbourg worked with Noé on his experimental short film Lux Æternal alongside Betty Blue star Béatrice Dalle, both playing fictional versions of themselves (Dalle is directing Gainsbourg in a film in this case). The film begins with a short montage of 1920s-style documentary footage of witch torture, and features Gainsbourg in a witch-burning scene. Lux Æternal concludes with a Luis Buñuel quote which I believe is relevant to Antichrist: “Thank God I’m an Atheist.”