Blood on the red carpet: Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ shocks Cannes

Cannes is still reeling from the explosive screening of the Danish director Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist. If the film itself was gory - scenes included genitals being removed, a bloody masturbation scene and a leg-drilling sequence - so was Monday's post-screening press conference.

It began with a shouting match between journalists as the Daily Mail's veteran showbusiness columnist Baz Bamigboye, seeking to defend the cinema-goers of Middle England, demanded that the 53-year-old Danish enfant terrible "explain and justify" the gore. Another hack piped up: "He's an artist, you're not. He doesn't have to explain anything!"

Von Trier couldn't have agreed more. "I don't have to explain anything. You are all my guests here, not the other way round," he said. "Anyway, I don't think about the audience when I make a film. I don't care. I make films for myself."

Von Trier, who casually announced himself "the world's greatest director", was best known until now for his 2003 film Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman, and Bjork's Dancing in the Dark video. If anyone dares to see it, Antichrist now looks destined to become his landmark movie.

It stars William Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple whose son falls out of an open window to his death while his parents are making love. In their grief, they go to their cabin in the woods where things turn nasty. She turns into a sexually voracious, sado-masochistic she-devil, and gets out the scissors and electric drill.

(New York magazine carries the best full-on description - though as the writer warns, "Read on only if you want to skip lunch and cross your legs for the rest of the day!")

Von Trier, trying to inject a lighter note into his increasingly heavy press conference, put the blame for the most extreme scenes on his lead actress. "Charlotte took it too far," he said. "I tried to, but I just couldn't stop it." Needless to say, the Mail's Mr Showbiz was not amused.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Hollywood Insider: "The movie looks almost tauntingly great, of course, with von Trier's longtime collaborator (and Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winner) Anthony Dod Mantle as cinematographer. So it's one good-looking, publicity-grabbing provocation, with an overlay of pseudo-Christian allegory thrown."

Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood-elsewhere.com: "There's no way Antichrist isn't a major career embarrassment for co-stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a possible career stopper for Von Trier. It's an out-and-out disaster - one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I've ever seen in my life."

Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph: "Shot in silvery monochromes and textured earth-colours, and full of bewitching ultra slo-mos, it looks brilliant. The performances are brave and truthful. What is it about? Something to do with modern-day therapy as a doomed attempt to deal with the elemental forces that both divide and compel men and women? I'm not sure."

Peter Brunette, Reuters: "All the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged. The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images." ·