ANTICHRIST = AMAZINGCHRIST!

So I finally got round to watching Antichrist the other day and, well, I've really got to hand it to Lars Von Trier. Let's be honest, he doesn't exactly do things in halves.

Take, for example, Breaking the Waves, his breakthrough English language hit and darling of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Frankly, it was beyond grim - it was double-grim topped with extra cheesy grimness. For an unrelenting two hours and forty minutes, no less. In 1998, Von Trier went one better with The Idiots, a staggeringly offensive film in which a bunch of middle class folk go full retard and indulge in hot spaz sex for a hefty chunk of the movie's not insubstantial running time. AO Scott of the New York Times described it as having "nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience." And he was quite right. Then last year, as if to rub it all into our disgusting, bourgeois faces, there was Antichrist.

To say that Antichrist split the critics down the middle is an understatement. In a lovely piece of Kubrickian symmetry, the movie finished up with a straight-down-the-line 50% average on Rotten Tomatoes. Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple struggling to cope with the trauma caused by the death of their young son, it was the film that finally proved that Von Trier wasn't so much the enfant terrible of European cinema as much as its fucked up little cousin who may or may not be illegitimate. Some people thought it should be banned. And at its now infamous Cannes press conference, Von Trier was even challenged to justify the film's existence by one particularly hateful critic (hello, Baz Bamigboye!) Von Trier countered by declaring he was the best film director in the world, which is untrue, but a fairly typical and not entirely unexpected response from the Danish auteur.

Why the ire? Well, that's easy. The movie starts with a close-up penetration shot intercut with the accidental and violent death of a child. The action quickly moves to a cabin in the woods in which all kinds of allegorical horrors take place. These include a scene in which a fox eats its own intestines and some pretty horrific close-up images of genital mutilation in the film's surreal finale. It's horrible. It's unnerving. It's also pretty unforgettable. Like his Palmes D'or winner Dancer In The Dark, Von Trier's film takes its audience to an extreme place and leaves it there to fend for itself. And while it may be dripping with dread and terror, Antichrist is never a depressing experience. In fact, there's more despair in your average Rob Schneider movie or those strange American Pie sequels that always go straight to video (you know the ones, films like American Pie: Band Camp, American Pie: The Naked Mile and, perhaps most shockingly of all, American Pie: Excuse Me While I Skewer My Own Cock With A Pitchfork.)

Of course, compared to some of the more extreme Japanese horror films, like the stuff Takashi Miike's been putting out for years, Antichrist is about as offensive as the Garbage Pail Kids Movie (a whopping 2.7 on the IMDB - that's pretty terrible but still higher than several Uwe Boll films, dirge fans.) There is, however, another key reason people hate this movie and that's Von Trier's apparently rampant misogyny. The film really doesn't like women. How else could it justify a scene in which the primary character chops off her own clitoris? Ok, so she did smash in her fella's penis a few scenes before, but that's just fanning the flames...this chick's got issues. After putting Bjork through all kinds of torture in Dancer In The Dark, and subjecting Nicole Kidman to hell on earth in Dogville (actually, we'll forgive them that one) Von Trier's probably not exactly the most popular person down the Women's Institute these days.

But no matter. Dodgy sexual politics aside (and the politics are EXTREMELY dodgy, I'm just not the best person to comment) Antichrist is a cinematic experience as much as, I don't know, Avatar. Like James Cameron's space extravaganza, it doesn't necessarily have the greatest screenplay in the world (neither film makes that much sense) but it doesn't need it. It's more interested in the sheer visceral possiblities of cinema than anything else. Viewed purely in terms of genre conventions, Antichrist is a cracking video nasty, a twisted, gothic body horror laced with spine-chilling tension. The suggestion that Gainsbourg might not just be batshit crazy, that she actually might be possessed by the Devil itself is a pretty tantalising intepretation.

So the critics can say what they like about Lars Von Trier. Beyond the controversy, and despite all the hype that threatens to drown everything he does, the simple fact is that the guy can really make films.