This is the first thing I saw about the new Lars Von Trier film, Antichrist. Hell of a shot, no? So I’m intrigued. Then I find out that the center-stage naked man there is Willem Dafoe, and intrigued becomes genuinely interested. (Just because Willem Dafoe is the man, not necessarily because of his naked ass…I have no attachment to that in particular. For the record.) AND THEN they tell me it was shot on a Red One, which I have had the glorious priveledge of working with on some shoots for Chaos Films. I’m sold. So I went in to the film not knowing much, other than it would be beautifully shot, well-acted, and creepy as hell. I was not wrong. Not in the least.

I was right about Mr. Dafoe, he is most certainly the man. He walks right into his role as the unnamed “He”, a detatched therapist in a disjointed marraige to equally unnamed “She”, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. After the tragic death of their infant son, the couple try to come to terms with their grief (or lack thereof); She moves violently through despair and anxiety, while He focuses his energies on helping her. Their “therapy sessions”, which usually end in violent sex, uncover her fear of the woods near a cabin she spent time at, and He believes that taking her back there will help ease her fears and, hopefully, her grief. So they go. Then things get weird.

This is not to say that things weren’t weird before this point. But they spiral out of control when He becomes obsessed with finding her cure and She goes fucking batshit crazy. (Yes, I do believe that is the technical term.) Bring on the witches and genital mutilation and fucked up woodland creatures.

Now in any other hands, this film could have turned into a flimsy torture thriller about a crazy bitch in a cabin going on a murderous rampage. But Lars Von Trier does not make flimsy thrillers. If anything, this film is crushingly heavy. As expected from Von Trier, the cinematography is shadowy and deliberate, piling tension upon tension upon more tension. And where you might expect a cheap cat scare to diffuse said tension, oh no! Von Trier gives you something disturbing and eerie to stare at for an extended period of time. And in the end, it’s the cinematography that really makes this film worth watching. Notice that the characters don’t even have names, let alone complicated backstories and lives outside the events currently unfolding. The story is clever, but it intentionally takes a back seat to the visual imagery — which in a way, serves to tell the story more vividly than any dialogue would. Not a single frame is wasted, but feels meticulously planned and poured over, and the execution of every moment is flawless. This is not a horror movie, but a work of art worthy of its own museum exhibit. And I say this not out of pretention, but as someone who has been behind a camera and knows the challenges of putting your dreams (or nightmares, as it were) onto a screen.

And that’s what you should know going into the film: this is not a horror movie. Accept that, and you’ll do just fine.