Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is pretentious. Its kick-start tragedy, a boy who falls out of a window and dies while his parents are having sex, is filmed in slow-motion and accompanied by an aria. The movie is also explicit, with the aforementioned scene including an extreme close-up of the negligent penis thrusting into the negligent vagina and several subsequent shots of angry sex, grieving sex, masochistic sex.

And when, in what hopefully is meant to be a dream sequence, a fox turns to the father and growls, “Chaos reigns!” Antichrist is unequivocally ridiculous.

Bundle these characteristics together and you have a film that some viewers may consider art but most will find insufferable. Which shouldn’t be surprising: With a résumé including unpleasantries such as Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville, von Trier is skilled at punishing both his characters and his audience. And in this case, he’s unapologetic, offering a statement in the production notes that he “can offer no excuse for ‘Antichrist’”—he claims to have written it while in a deep depression—though he also calls it “the most important film of my entire career.”... Continued