You remember the time when you were a child and you were at your aunts house and she had to go to the grocers and she handed you the remote for the tv/satellite and told you to not go pass channel 1056 because they were for “adults”?

Yes, you remember, and then you puffed up your chest, psychologically adding 9 years to your mentality, and turned to channel 1057 only to be rewarded with your own screaming as you saw two lesbians go at it on the screen.

Well, when someone says “Dalena, Antichrist is pretty disturbing and not for the faint-hearted,” it’s not your cue to puff up your chest and directly add it to your netflix queue as if it was a movie challenge. But if you insist on doing so, just know that this is much more than turning to channel 1057.

Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is split up into five parts (Prologue, Grief, Pain, Despair, The Three Beggars, and Epilogue) and is about a couple that loses their son and the psychiatrist/husband (Willem Defoe) and the writer/wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) go back to the woods of Eden to deal with the death.

I want to focus a bit on the the prologue because it is definitely a daring and new way to tell a story in cinema. The prologue captures beautiful black-and-white, hyper-slow images where we are shown the couple to be shagging it up quite a bit and the child falling to his death. Trier purposely shows us the catalyst of the film stretched over a period of time so we have to witness the beautiful images but the tragic events that happen as George Frideric Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” plays in the background, setting the tone for the entire piece. Basically, Trier drops a rock into your shoe as you embark the rest of your journey.

The journey is overall amazing. The cinematography continues to capture you well into the last scene from natural lighting of the green forest to the juxtaposition of the characters vs. nature that creates a sense of scope. The performances by Defoe and Gainsbourg are overly-convincing that their characters becoming increasingly realistic and rich as the story turns increasingly haunting and disturbing.

But what ultimately embellishes this work-of-art is the symbolism and undertones threaded tightly around the narrative and story. It’s a story about science and religion but also expanding on the return of Adam, Eve, and original sin. Trier constructs so much significance from the visuals and the dialogue that just every word and image in the movie is up for analysis. I am trying hard to not go any further, because even the story is up for discussion, but the content is so robust and deep that it’s hard not to start giddying up for a full on analysis.

I want to drive this notion home that this will be a disturbing film but also poetic and beautiful all around. As a reviewer, you try to find a balance of being engrossed into the film and analyzing it but the lines are so smudged here.

To conclude, Antichrist was as if I am standing in front of a mechanical baseball pitcher and not knowing when it’s going to shoot off and even when you realize the ball was coming your way, you weren’t prepared for the impact it would have.