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Niki Flynn (Niki)
Username: Niki

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.149.156.242
Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 10:03 am:   

DON'T READ this if you haven't seen the film. Just thought I should start a separate thread to talk about details without ruining it for others!

I already want to see it again because I have so many different “interpretations” of what happened in my head. This one really plays on my worst fears - the monster inside, what we're capable of, the power of the mind, etc. I also readily admit that one of the central themes (emotion vanquishing cold logic, albeit at a terrible price) is playing a big part in my life right now, so I’m sure I got more out of the film personally than many others will.

My first thought when they went to the woods was that, like in the hypnosis scene, we were still inside her mind, that Dafoe had somehow got trapped in her subconscious - or that her inner demons were manifesting themselves in the real world for him to confront. And he was so focused on helping her, but in such a creepily sterile way, that he couldn't see them for the harbingers of doom that they were. That or he was too arrogant to heed the warnings.

WAS she really a witch? ARE women really evil? I love the idea that the recognition of her innate evil (the bit with the shoes, which she suppressed, and the mini-shot of her seeing and ignoring in the flashback to the prologue) drove her mad. Her line near the end, “A crying woman is a scheming woman”, is strange, though. I don’t think she WAS scheming; I think she was at the mercy of “nature”.

And then there’s the fox. LvT says that the fox isn’t meant to be a joke:

“No, it comes from these Shamanic journeys that I did. It's not like getting onto a plane! Yes, I am still afraid of that. You have a drum beat and you go into a trance that takes you into this parallel world. And there, I talked to this fox and it demanded to have a line. The first fox I met was a red fox. And it started to split itself to pieces. And afterwards, I met a couple of other foxes. Silver foxes with little cubs. And they said to me, 'Never trust the first fox you meet.' So it was interesting.”

I find that almost as creepy as the actual scene. The cinema I saw it in was almost deserted, but I still didn’t hear any laughter. The review in the Telegraph has this bit, which I liked:

“It’s a jaw-dropping moment, utterly absurd by the norms of 'straight’ cinema and of modern society. And yet, throughout much of history, mankind has believed in talking animals and in beasts as truth-tellers. My laughter was tinged with a fear - that I was a fool to laugh.”

Me? I was just unnerved. It didn’t seem “absurd” because at that point in the story I thought that the animals were simply aspects of her madness, which he was finally seeing (and catching). Given that LvT has spoken so openly about how the film was both inspired by and made while he was suffering major depression, the symbols are hardly surprising.

I’m not at all sure what to make of the epilogue, though. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 10:16 am:   

Niki, I haven't seen the film but am intrigued by everybody's comments about it. What makes this movie different from so many books & films which imply that we're all supposedly to blame for society's disintegration? Obviously I'm referring to the child's death and the moral collapse of the film's two protagonists.

It's just that I see this theme of the 'commonplace' people being responsible for society's ills everywhere these days - while the rich and powerful are surely to blame, in fact - and wondered if this 'guilt' is in truth the essence of the movie. If so, it's nothing new; if not, then I might see Antichrist.
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Niki Flynn (Niki)
Username: Niki

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.149.156.242
Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 10:19 am:   

I didn't get that idea from it at all, but then my interpretation is much more focused on the individual characters. And I definitely didn't see any moral collapse at all - just mental.
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 10:23 am:   

Ah, my use of 'moral collapse' wasn't judgemental at all - you can tell by my ignorance that I haven't actually seen the film. Maybe I should shut up & just go see it.
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John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert)
Username: John_l_probert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.253.174.81
Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 01:34 pm:   

My first thought when they went to the woods was that, like in the hypnosis scene, we were still inside her mind, that Dafoe had somehow got trapped in her subconscious - or that her inner demons were manifesting themselves in the real world for him to confront. And he was so focused on helping her, but in such a creepily sterile way, that he couldn't see them for the harbingers of doom that they were. That or he was too arrogant to heed the warnings.

For some reason I didn't register that we may be in an 'internal world' at all but the rest of the film would have worked a lot better for me if I had. My fault I suspect, rather than LvT's

Her line near the end, “A crying woman is a scheming woman”, is strange, though. I don’t think she WAS scheming; I think she was at the mercy of “nature”.

I had taken that to mean that if a woman is upset by something or someone at the same time as she is expressing her unhappiness she is also planning what to do about it in the form of revenge. And certainly there seems to be some of that in the film, and not just revenge against her husband for trying to 'help' her but perhaps revenge against the child too - for just existing.
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.20.22
Posted on Monday, August 17, 2009 - 10:27 pm:   

Just back from 'Antichrist' and really don't know what to make of it... so here's just a stream of first impressions without any in-depth analysis - yet:

It was beautifully made, gorgeous to look at with two great performances - highly impressive on that score.

Was I shocked by the film? Yes, I was... at one scene in particular - how the hell did they make it look so convincing?!

Did I find it irritatingly pretentious - for the most part NO.

Did I understand it - for the most part NO lol.

It was however a surprisingly gripping and eerie experience not as far removed from the familiar horror genre as I had expected.

Films that sprang to mind as I watched were Nicolas Roeg's other great supernatural rumination on grief 'Don't Look Now' and that brilliant Australian horror from the 70s 'Long Weekend' - the line "nature is Satan's Church" sums both films up neatly.

So on the whole I rather liked 'Antichrist'. It kept me glued to the screen, made me think, made me jump, sent shivers up my spine a few times and etched a few images indelibly on my mind. Now I want to start analysing what it was about and, yes, even watch it again.

A relieved big thumbs up from me!
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.72.14.113
Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - 12:25 pm:   

The more I think about it the better 'Antichrist' is getting... always a good sign!

On one level it's a story of sado-masochistic madness apparently triggered by a too deep study of medieval witchcraft and the barbarities inflicted on innocent women at the time.

The mother/wife becomes like a screaming harpie avenging herself on the two males closest to her for all of womankind. She begins by subtle acts of painful cruelty on the boy (the shoes) and then appears to be complicit in his death by not intervening when she had the chance to.

The unsuspecting husband (who blames grief) is then subjected to outwardly frenzied but actually quite calculated acts of sadistic torture and mutilation before she turns her madness in on herself in the ultimate act of masochistic misogyny.

And what do we make of the husband's own descent into madness? His hallucinations and final surrender to violence could be seen as folie a deux triggered - for him - by intense emotional turmoil, cabin fever and the breakdown of his psychological defences in the face of nature's blank cruelty and what can only be called his wife's vicious betrayal - what she did to their son even more than what she did to him.

That's a surface reading but there's so much potent symbolism in this movie as to warrant numerous deeper interpretations.
The Three Beggars: the deer, the fox and the crow point to folkloric symbolism while the forest markers of bridge, foxhole, dead tree are purely Freudian.
The epilogue seems to show womankind set free from nature with Willem Dafoe's character become the wild man of the woods. A helluva lot to take in...
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.236.171
Posted on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 - 05:11 pm:   

"... no one knows what it's about" - is that true, anyone?... Is this one of THOSE films?... (i.e., BLAIR WITCH, LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, anything by Lynch, etc.) Me, I'm still drooling in anticipation....

http://www.film.com/movies/antichrist/story/antichrist-most-beautiful-piece-mudd led/30358363
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.236.171
Posted on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 - 05:13 pm:   

Let me clarify: I'm not reading the posts above mine, because I don't want to spoil the virgin experience of watching this film - I just would like an op on where it falls on the scale between perfect clarity - utter muddledom.
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 - 05:28 pm:   

My reading of the film has become clearer and clearer since watching it. It reminds me most of 'Don't Look Now' in that respect. A genuinely intelligent thought-provoking adult horror of surprising subtlety (apart from those scenes) that follows the accepted horror template more closely than you might expect...
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.236.171
Posted on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 - 05:58 pm:   

...that follows the accepted horror template more closely than you might expect...

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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 - 06:29 pm:   

I think that Antichrist is the opposite of what it appears to be - a Harrowing of Hell, a gruesome account of Man's attraction/repulsion towards Nature; in a curious way, the movie is meant to be uplifting or at least, instructive. As in Nietzsche's writing (the philosopher is a favourite of Lars Von Trier's), the central message of the film is overcoming: Man and Woman (named only as 'He' and 'She' in the film) must break away from the Apollonian/Dionysian in order to evolve. And the 'old idols' - whether they be monotheism, pagan nature worship, our faith in religion and/or science, our definitions of male and female roles, or whatever clichéd mindset we still cling to - must be banished if we are to progress as a species.

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