Antichrist the movie – WTF?

If you’re not into horror movies (which I’m not) you may want to skip this one. If so, no worries. I’ll see you tomorrow.

The wife is rummaging through the box of horror movies she has decided to watch before she releases them into the wild.

“I want you to watch his one with me.”

I’m busy at my computer. “Watch what?”

“This movie about the Antichrist.”

“And why would I want to watch it?”

“Because if it is Biblically accurate, you should know this, and if it isn’t I can tell you where it went wrong.”

I can’t conceive of a horror movie being Biblically accurate, even if it is supposed to be about the Antichrist.

“If I must.” I set aside the work I’m doing and go watch the movie.

So, we sit down to watch Antichrist. Yes, spoilers are ahead.

Within the first few minutes I already don’t want to continue. Not that it is overly horrific but because it is all in slow motion, like some European art film. The movie centers around Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who don’t even get character names in the film. The film opens with them having sex, while their toddler son somehow manages to climb out of his crib, crawls across the floor, onto a chair, on to a table, and onto a windowsill of a window that has conveniently blown opened (presumably due to wind from the snow falling outside) and falls to his death.

Most of the rest of the movie is Willem Dafoe, who is a therapist, trying to help his wife comes to terms with her grief over the lost child. He starts by getting a list of what scares her, and top o the list is ‘nature.’ So they spend the rest of the movie in a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the woods. And they have a lot of sex. They do therapeutic exercises to try and get the wife to face her fears. Like walking from one stone to another stone ten feet away through the grass. It is slow, plodding and boring.

Every now and again, something odd happens. Like acorns falling on the roof at night while the couple tries to sleep. A deer giving birth to a fawn is running through the woods. A fox in the bushes saying ‘chaos reigns’. (It’s the only time an animal talks in the whole movie, Disney this ain’t.) A baby crow falls out of the nest, covered in ants, then gets eaten by another bird. It isn’t until the last segment of the movie that it gets really weird. Dafoe goes into the attic (for no apparent reason) only to find a bunch of odd drawings that look like scenes from the Salem witch trials (it’s kinda hard to make them out). His wife gets frantic and tries to have sex with him. She slams a board into his crotch, then jacks him off until blood comes out. Then she drills into his leg with an old hand woodworking drill and attaches a grindstone to his leg. He tries to flee when he wakes up but she gives chase and hauls him back to the cabin. She tries to have sex with him again and then mutilates her own genitalia. A deer, a fox, and a crow show up (the Three Beggars) to fulfill some type of prophecy. When they show up, someone will die!

She ends up dying. He manages to get the grindstone off his leg. As he’s stumbling back to civilization, he is surrounded by a mob of people walking through the woods.

End of film.

I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some kind of art film or a drive-in schlock movie, or both, or neither. What’s with the mob? Are they supposed to be souls of the damned or something? What I do know is that having watched the movie I’ve lost an hour and 50 minutes I’ll never get back.

“If I’d known that is what it was I wouldn’t have bothered,” the wife says.

“You aren’t allowed to pick out what movies we watch again. EVER!”

I’m thinking if I end up watching the Exorcist or Hellraiser, they can’t possibly be as annoying or slow moving as this movie. Do yourself a favor, my Hordeling, and don’t waste your time on this one.

If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum