The prologue is in black and white, in slow motion, under Handel’s aria Lascia ch’io pianga: a couple — credited only as He and She — are making love while their toddler son climbs to an open window and falls. The sequence is so precisely composed that it registers as grief before it registers as horror. Everything in Antichrist descends from that window.

Lars von Trier structured the film in four chapters — Grief, Pain, Despair, The Three Beggars — with a prologue and an epilogue, and a dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky. It premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with walkouts and sustained applause in roughly equal measure. Charlotte Gainsbourg won the Best Actress award there; both she and Willem Dafoe later won at the Bodil Awards, as did cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.

Charlotte Gainsbourg plays She as a woman whose grief has no civilized shape — no stages, no arc toward acceptance, no desire for recovery. Willem Dafoe plays He as the therapist-husband who believes the right method can contain anything. The film is largely about what happens when that belief meets something that cannot be contained. Both performances demand a physical and emotional commitment the film earns in full.

Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography moves between austere monochrome beauty and forest imagery that begins natural and grows steadily hostile. The couple retreat to a cabin called Eden. Lars von Trier uses that name with full intent: nature here is not a refuge but a force, ancient and indifferent, and the film suggests their grief pulls that force toward them.

Antichrist is not interested in whether you are comfortable. It is interested in whether cinema can go as far as grief actually goes — further than narrative, further than explanation, into territory that has no resolution because grief itself does not resolve. Viewers who need a plot that closes will not find one. Those who do not may find it one of the most uncompromising films of its decade.

Tags: Willem Dafoe, Lars von Trier, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist, psychological horror