Antichrist

If you've heard anything about "Antichrist," then my telling you that it's beautiful probably sounds like an act of willful intellectual perversity. Very likely you've heard a list of gruesome highlights that make it sound like a nasty Internet video from Lithuania: an explicit sex act so violent that the man ejaculates blood, a hole driven through someone's leg with a power tool, a woman mutilating her own genitalia with a pair of scissors.

Those things all happen in the movie's grotesque final act, and they are undeniably shocking (and meant to be). Taken together, they probably account for a minute or so of screen time, about 1 percent of the movie. They don't define or encompass "Antichrist" any more than "The Godfather" can be boiled down to that severed horse head. In fact, I'd argue that these scenes of violence are far from being the worst scenes in the movie. They emerge from von Trier's original desire to make something close to a conventional horror film -- you can see traces of "The Shining" and "Rosemary's Baby" in "Antichrist" -- and they're only superficial or symbolic representations of the real violence between the unnamed central couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

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