Plenty of blood and gore but utterly drained of any emotion

The one thing I had not expected Antichrist to be was boring. The build-up to Lars von Trier’s controversial film which opened yesterday had only offered two alternatives. This was a beautifully shot work of enigmatic art. Or it was just a desperate attempt to shock and win success through scandal. But in the end it was just pointless and tedious.

Perhaps the pre-publicity had lessened the surprise factor. So the audience – a rather sparse one at The Cornerhouse art cinema in Manchester yesterday – were waiting for the full penetration shot, the erect penis ejaculating blood, the log smashed in the man’s genitals, the demented wife drilling a hole in her husband’s leg and then cutting off her own clitoris. For all the spurting red liquid there was something curiously bloodless about it all, just as there was nothing erotic about the penetration shot. It was stylised, mechanical and, curiously – for a film which billed itself as about pain, grief and despair – drained of emotion.

That was one of the many implausibilities of a work which pivots on a child who dies falling from a window while his parents have wild sex, and in which the father, a psychotherapist, demonstrates not one iota of emotion at his son’s loss. The most unlikely moment came when a disembowelled fox speaks – to say “Chaos reigns” – which provided the only laugh in the film, although I don’t think it was supposed to be funny.

The first person to walk out, an hour in, was a balding middle-aged chap. Perhaps he had been hoping for a mucky movie. Soon after, a young woman left when the husband had a log thrust into his genitals. She came back five minutes later, because she had forgotten her bag, but left again soon afterwards when the autoclitoridectomy was in full flow.

“Can’t I just be afraid without a definite object?” asks the wife. In real life you can; it is called depression. But not in art. There is no such constellation. “There is no good and evil in therapy,” says the husband.

But there has to be motive in a film if it is to be meaningful. The random act of the mother deforming the feet of her own child by putting his shoes on the wrong feet every day says nothing to those of us who pass for normal.

Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. Mutilations in movies usually go with the twisted pleasure of sadism or the vicarious poetic justice of revenge. But this was just demented and there does not seem a great deal of artistic purpose in an arbitrary act of mental illness rooted only in the preposterous delusion that nature controls women and “Nature is Satan’s church”.

What of the religion? Antichrist is popularly taken to be the polar opposite of God, the incarnation of utter evil. But this was too vacuous to be that. In the Book of Revelation the Antichrist is an impostor who arrives before the end of the world and fools the gullible into thinking him Christ. But that had no resonance here either.

Perhaps the opposite of good is not evil but meaninglessness. In which case von Trier achieved his end. I just wish he hadn’t wasted two hours of my time in doing so. He is a bit old now to play the enfant terrible. And if you take the enfant away you are left with just plain old terrible.

Follow