A. horror. film.
Full-blown straight up horror…
Took two days to watch…very…hard…to watch.
Not seeing that again. The actors are brilliant.
There are levels to interpreting this mental and visual and spiritual assault…I am not even claiming to have scratched the surface. I am not sure what the surface is…or was.
On one level…a detached arrogant therapist commits two cardinal errors…sexing the patient and treating someone you love. She, on the other hand is losing her mind, and eventually drags him down into the whirling insanity.
It is logic vs emotion, man vs. woman, with the man winning the battle but losing the war. The therapist but breaks his rule, once, twice, thrice…the third sex scene after the loss of the child…in the woods, hitting her, being the evil man, playing into her madness…he is lost in her world…and he never leaves. In the epilogue, it shows he is fully in tune with “nature”…chaos reigns…
We can look at this from the aspect of inversion.
Antichrist means opposition to Christ, and instead of Christ.
Eden = garden of God. Adam and Eve were cast out for failing…no more f
Here, Eden = garden of Satan. The Adversary seeks their destruction. Adam and Eve should flee this garden. They don’t flee. They are destroyed.
More inversion. Eve is to bear the child of promise, the one who will crush the Adversary. Here she contributes to her son’s death. Her son is Nic…short for Nicholas. This means conquer the people, or victory over the nations etc.
Destroying Nic destroys their marriage and their lives.
They lose… everything…
'Abraham was told to sacrifice his son, Isaac, a type of Christ, but at the crucial moment, he was shown a ram, which was sacrificed instead. There is no substitute…one of them has to go. And there is no escape from this garden… he merges with the chaos and overcomes his fear - losing her - in the worst way imaginable. The therapist undergoes therapy, and accepts his place in the garden. She also “accepts” her place in the garden too.
Again, genius acting by the pair.
The characters do great and terrible harm to each other.
The scene with him dragging the weight reminds one of Kidman dragging her weight…both sacrificial lambs.
The truth…I am doing all this analysis to distance myself from the film…it presents the world and people not merely as flawed…but inherently evil and self-destructive. The scene where he…does her at the tree…and what she does to him. The justifications…the lies they tell themselves and each other…
From the start he blames her for the child’s death so why is he analysing her? What does he want? When he discovers the thesis of her madness…why doesn’t he leave?
Why does she buy into the intrinsic evil of women? Then she abuses the baby with the shoes…and weighs him down with a grindstone.
But then, this film isn’t about the answers, it’s about the questions it raises.