What they’re saying about: Antichrist

It is one of the most controversial cinema openings in Britain for years. The Danish director Lars von Trier's latest film, Antichrist, finally opens today with an 18 certificate after its much-ballyhooed premiere at the Cannes film festival in May.

Is it art - or exploitative nonsense masquerading as art? Critics, writers and artists have been arguing for and against ever since it was hissed at by some and applauded by others at the Cannes screening.

Von Trier, whose previous films include Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, has explained that he wrote the new film "as a kind of therapy" after a period of severe depression two years ago.

Briefly, it starts with a little boy falling to his death from an open window after watching his parents making love. The husband (played by the American actor Willem Dafoe) takes his distraught wife (Anglo-French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) off to their cabin in the woods - named Eden - to recover.

At which point the wife becomes a monstress. She smashes his genitals with a block of wood, masturbates him until he ejaculates blood, and drills a hole in his leg. Then she cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. For the sake of those who wish to see it for themselves, or don't wish to hear any more, The First Post will not give away the ending.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:

FOR:

Gillian Wearing, artist, the Guardian: "I think it is genius. I know people who would hate me if I recommended them to see this - the violence is horrible and at times the film becomes almost ridiculous, such as in the scene with the talking fox. But this is a visceral film. I rarely come out of films feeling that I have experienced anything of life, but Antichrist shows you how depression, dislocation and desperation feel.

"I have read a few reviews where people were balking at Von Trier having a breakdown, implying that perhaps it was a gimmick. But I don't think this film could possibly have been made without that experience. This is film as art. It's not trying to be reasonable, and I find it quite close to painting in the way it plays with the abstract, the real and the unreal."

AGAINST:

Bryan Appleyard, journalist, the Sunday Times: "It is bad, very, very bad. It's not bad because it contains some of the nastiest scenes I have ever seen - though it does. It's bad because mere self-indulgence is not art. A hopeless ragbag of pointlessly pretty shots, hack metaphors, misogyny, undergraduate portentousness and plagiarised cinematography, it left me, by the closing scene, angry.

"Antichrist may be seen as just another movie shocker, concern about which will be seen, in time, as quaint. But I don't think so. Its sheer badness and the undergraduate cynicism of its director raise this to a different level. Why did Trier shoot those scenes the way he did? Not in the name of art, but to compete, to do something, anything, to stir the jaded sensibilities of an age stunned by screen violence. And the suckers in the art-house crowd fell for it."

FOR:

Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College, the Guardian: "Antichrist circles relentlessly around acts of transgression. The violence is defiantly excessive and beautiful. It is gendered, but more misanthropic than misogynistic.

"The graceful yet ecstatic beauty of death - literal and symbolic ("la petite mort") - sets the tone. Black and white scenes, in which the camera moves with a dreamlike slowness, are followed by dazzlingly dyed scenes of claustrophobic carnage. The effect is breathtaking and compulsive, like a drug; I would have watched the film a second time if it had been possible."

AGAINST:

Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope: "Antichrist isn't the kind of film that invites you to share in any experience, and be an active part of it - rather, with its supposed reflective misogyny and mounting stupidity, it pushes you in and pushes you out concurrently. It's a grunge immersiveness that's akin to arthouse 3D, a kind of pathetic attempt to use extreme cinema to keep viewers and critics interested in film at a time when cinema itself has started to mean so very little. I really couldn't care less whether the supposedly chronically depressed Dane is sick or if he's faking it. If he's sick, Antichrist is akin to a sporadic series of infantile finger-paintings; if he's faking it, then, well, he's just a big fake."

FOR:

Kaleem Aftab, journalist, the Independent: "Some believed Antichrist to be just another example of the Danish director's misogyny, others that this was his most anti-male film. Personally, my initial reaction, and it's a conviction that grows stronger everyday, is that this is the director's masterpiece. Indeed, since it played in the middle weekend of the [Cannes] festival, I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

"There seemed to be an honesty in this film that was beyond anything the Dane had done before, and this despite it being made within the confines of the horror genre. So much so that when I met with the director at the famous Hotel du Cap I felt an urge to give him a hug."

AGAINST:

Roger Ebert, film critic, the Chicago Sun Times: "It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbour an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen."

FOR:

Marian Masone, The Brooklyn Rail: "Von Trier makes many missteps (introducing, for instance, a talking fox), but his films remain worth watching for the nuggets of genius that stand out. In Antichrist they stand out in the imagery - like the giant tree whose roots are writhing naked humans. It's pretty cool, and it represents the wild, feral aspects of madness. But, his representation of women is problematic, as it is in most of his other films (such as in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark)."

AGAINST:

Peter Brunette, film critic, the Hollywood Reporter: "Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film Von Trier has ever made.

"The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images, abetted by an often superb sound design. From the opening titles, abstract expressionism reigns powerfully and conveys a great deal of intense, if finally unspecifiable, meaning. Unfortunately at some point a story has to be told, no matter how minimalist, and with actual human beings, no matter how symbolically freighted. This is where the film falls apart."

FOR:

Samantha Morton, actress, the Guardian: "The cinematography here is breathtaking, pushing the boundaries between emotion and technology, like the ancient vines that are photographed. Film is so important to me and for that reason I am glad I saw Antichrist. However, like I do with my life - and especially my mind - I take care. A bit like visiting a loved one who's going through some terrible, dark pain in the face of which we seem powerless, it can be emotionally crippling to watch. So for that reason, I say: take care viewing this. But if you can take the journey, take it."

AGAINST:

Christopher Hart, journalist, the Daily Mail: "The world of Antichrist is blatantly amoral, without any sense of justice or retribution whatever. Its mingling of sex and violence, the cheapest and nastiest trick in the book, is usually one which the BBFC [the British Board of Film Classification] pounces on in a straight horror film. But here they are blinded by their own cultural snobbery, swallowing the lie that Antichrist is Art. It's approval by the BBFC raises the question: what on earth does it take for a film to be banned nowadays? If the visceral sadism of Von Trier's film passes muster, surely anything will?"