Chekhov's Gun: The wrench under the porch.

Book Ends: Both the prologue and epilogue are Deliberately Monochrome with no sound except for Händel's 'Liascia ch'io pianga'.

Later on, He runs into a fox in the process of self-disemboweling itself, and before that, He wakes up with his hand covered in ticks full of blood.

Body Horror: While hiking to Eden, He finds a doe … with a stillborn fawn hanging off her.

This also goes for the horde of women He sees in the end.

The Blank: Pretty much everyone who isn't He, She, or Nic has their face blurred out.

Big Bad Triumvirate: The Three Beggars, Grief, Pain and Despair, three supernatural beings who haunt Eden and caused the plot by driving She insane.

Ax-Crazy: Between her increasingly frantic and illegible writings, her firm belief that women are inherently evil, and the excessively manic and violent behavior towards He, She fits this trope to a T.

Animalistic Abomination: The Three Beggars, Grief, Pain and Despair, are represented as a doe, a fox, and a crow respectively.

Agony of the Feet: While alone with Nic, She used to switch his shoes, which caused small deformations in his feet.

The film was the first of Von Trier's 'Depression Trilogy', followed by Melancholia and Nymphomaniac.įor the similarly-named trope, see The Antichrist. Not helping was Von Trier (facetiously, we hope) declaring himself the 'best director in the world' and Gainsbourg winning Best Actress. Many detractors accused the movie of being deeply misogynistic as well as artless euroshlock. The movie started a heated controversy during its premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, with most critics praising the film for its technological accomplishments, while bitterly divided over its merits or lack thereof. He, a psychologist, proposes exposure therapy at their cabin in the woods appropriately called 'Eden', due to skepticism surrounding traditional medication-based treatment. The film centers around 'He' and 'She' ( Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively) attempting to deal with the grief surrounding the death of their infant son, Nic. Imagine what a film co-directed by the Stanley Kubrick who made The Shining, the David Lynch who made Eraserhead and the Andrei Tarkovsky who made Stalker (1979) could look like, and you're getting close to the idea of what Antichrist is.

Antichrist is a 2009 psychological horror art film written and directed by Lars von Trier.

Lars von trier on willem dafoe penis