Antichrist director Lars von Trier plays god to create a new morality

I don't have a choice... It's the hand of God, I'm afraid. And I am the best film director in the world. I'm not sure God is the best god in the world. This was Lars von Trier's answer when asked to justify his latest controversial, sexually explicit and violent film, Antichrist on release from today.

Von Trier has no inhibition about announcing he is the best film director in the world - something that might suggest a touch of the omnipotent antichrist who in the next breath compares himself to God and questions God's ability to do his job. And yet, this is precisely what von Trier's film is about, leaving us ultimately in an upside-down world ruled by Rational Thought and destructiveness.

The plot of Antichrist is simple enough. We enter the bathroom of an apartment where we see, graphically portrayed, a young couple making love, their passion reflected in the chaotic spin of the washing machine behind them. In a child's bedroom, a window blows open and heavy snowflakes begin to float through the air. The couple's toddler son wakes up, is enchanted by the snow, gets out of bed, opens the baby gate separating him from his parents and spies them making love. He turns to the camera smiling, like a small god.

The toddler retraces his steps to the open window of his bedroom where he shows his teddy the snowflakes, climbs onto the ledge and he and his teddy leap out the window to their death on the pavement below. The toddler's expression as he falls is striking and gives the impression that he is having a fantasy of flying or being one of the snowdrops - he appears ecstatic and calm as he descends in slow motion.

There is a powerful sense that von Trier is working out some inner drama

The rest of the film is the story of the mother's (Charlotte Gainsbourg) inconsolable guilt and grief and her psychologist husband's (Willem Dafoe) attempts to heal her by means of 'exposure' therapy in which he encourages her to confront her fears in order to discover that they do not exist in reality.

As the husband's need to control his wife's emotions becomes evident, so does her passive hatred of him. He takes her back to Eden, the cottage in the forest where she had spent time alone with her son and seems to represent the place in which she first becomes aware of her own unhappiness. 'She', as the wife/mother is called, is compliant and masochistically accepts her husband’s control.

The hatred between them emerges as they enter into an increasingly sadistic struggle in which sex and violence are used as palliatives to grief. 'She' finally breaks and savagely attacks her husband's genitals and then, when 'He' is unconscious, crucifies him by pining a drill through his leg. 'He' becomes the Antichrist. 'She' then cuts off her clitoris in an act of self-castration that highlights her emotional castration. In the end 'She' is strangled by her husband in a scene that evokes the violence of their love-making.

Von Trier wrote the script for Antichrist in the midst of a crippling depression for which he was receiving cognitive therapy. He confesses he felt "no pleasure in doing this film" and ventures no ideas as to what the film signifies. However, there is a powerful sense in the film that von Trier is working out some inner drama that gives the film its haunting, dream-like quality.

Von Trier's picture of his childhood is bleak and lonely. His parents were civil servants who rebelled against authority and rules. They were committed to communism, atheism and nudism. They also did not believe in telling their son what to do as a child, when to go to bed, etc and it seems he was left to his own devices much of the time.

The toddler sees his parents making love, and smiles at his new power over them

"I could do more or less what I wanted," he says. The effect of this was to leave von Trier anxious and frightened of the world around him, a world of chaos in which he had to stave off disaster by obsessionally controlling his objects. His role as film director has enabled von Trier to maintain some illusion of being able to control the objects and people in his world. He can be God on the film set world of his creation.

Von Trier does not seem to have recovered fully from his breakdown following his mother's death in 1995. On her deathbed, his mother disclosed the fact that the father he had grown up with until his death, when von Trier was 18, was not his real father and that she had chosen instead a Roman Catholic composer to be his biological father in the hope that her son would inherit his artistic genes.

Von Trier converted to Catholicism, explaining that it was partly "to piss off a few of my countrymen (mostly protestant)". He suffered a further blow when his biological father refused to see him, stipulating that "we can talk through my lawyer".

The deception about his origins and the confusion of growing up in a world in which authority was suspect and to be shunned come through as strong themes in Antichrist. The mother is aware that her toddler son has been waking in the night recently and can open the baby gate yet she never mentions this to her husband nor does she take precautions to secure the baby gate.

The toddler is left free to roam and when he discovers his parents making love, he smiles triumphantly in his new found power over them. His leap to his death and the subsequent trials and sufferings of his parents follow on from this scene.

The entire film can be read as episodes from von Trier's fantasies stemming from his early relationships. Excluded from mother by father, the little boy kiills himself in order to punish his mother for her infidelity.

In this way, he can live on in her mind forever, he can forever come between the couple, and he can also have mother to himself in death.

While von Trier has been accused repeatedly of being a misogynist, the prevailing sense in Antichrist is his emotional identification and empathy with the mother along with the desire to possess and control her, as played out by the father. 

It is the father, the wooden psychologist whom the mother accuses of being arrogant and believing he is better than the doctors treating her, who is depicted as unable to feel and who is reviled. The father has been a distant husband and a distant father, who is terrified of emotions. He eschews psychic reality in favour of rational thought and this is where the film becomes more than simply a biographical narrative or a story of Oedipal revenge.

Von Trier has created a modern day morality play, situated in the garden of Eden (the place where the troubles begin). What unfolds is a lethal fight between Rational Thinking, as represented by the husband, and Nature, as represented by the wife.

The therapist husband consistently denies his wife's psychic reality, her fantasies and feelings, and insists that only what is concrete is real. He asserts, "Good and evil have nothing to do with therapy." To which his wife sardonically replies, "Freud is dead." Rational Thinking attacks Nature because it cannot be controlled, like the unconscious.

'She' aligns herself with Nature. 'She' explains that because women cannot control their bodies, they are subject to Nature. When 'She' makes this clear to her husband, he replies by stating that he wants to hurt her, Nature, as much as he can. 'She' says, "By frightening me", and 'He' corrects her and says, "By killing you."

'He' cannot bear to be out of control. What is of paramount importance is that the world is ordered and this negates any need to differentiate between good and evil. While good and evil do not exist for the therapist husband, they are clearly manifest within his wife who struggles with a growing awareness of her own destructiveness and guilt.

In the end it is precisely this conflict that is killed by Rational Thinking. The final scene depicts the husband, leaving Eden, hobbling on a crutch through a desiccated landscape where Nature has been destroyed. It is the final triumph of Rationality, the Antichrist, and the hills are suddenly swarming with pilgrims advancing towards their new God.

Von Trier's struggle to control the feelings and impulses of his own inner world are undoubtedly played out through the device of the morality play. But the final message is a bleak warning of the dangers of trying to control Nature and unconscious processes.

In its horror, the film conveys a deep sense of morality and, as its maker, von Trier is less of an Antichrist than he is a Trickster - a god who disturbs the order of things, who challenges the boundaries and crosses borders in order to create an awareness of a different reality. ·