With its explicit sex and scene of female genital mutilation, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist scandalised Cannes this year. Samantha Morton, Gillian Wearing and other women artists and academics give their opinion of the Danish director’s provocative new film

The opening title arrives as a provocation, a mission statement. “Lars von Trier,” it reads. “Antichrist.” At the Cannes film festival, where the film was unveiled in May, the audience responded with indulgent laughter. Over the years the international press has grown accustomed to the antics of the puckish Dane. This, after all, is the man who once dumped his festival prize in a dustbin, who dragged Nicole Kidman through the wringer in Dogville and provoked hoots of outrage when he won the Palme d’Or for his death row musical, Dancer In The Dark. And yet nothing – but nothing – could prepare us for the film that followed.

Antichrist opens, simultaneously, with a blaze of unsimulated sex and the death (simulated, one hopes) of a child, who topples from an upstairs window and cannons into the snow below. Bedevilled by guilt, his unnamed parents – He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – retreat to a cabin in the woods called Eden. There, matters go from bad to worse. Oppressive Defoe winds up hobbled and impotent, while Gainsbourg runs clean off the rails and starts hacking at her own genitals with a pair of scissors. Sitting in the dark of the Cannes Palais, the audience yelped and howled and covered their eyes. Legend has it that at least four viewers fainted dead away in their seats.

If Von Trier had come to cause a stir, he succeeded with bells on. Antichrist provided the one bona-fide scandal of this year’s festival. While Gainsbourg eventually went on to win the best actress award, the director was barracked at the official press conference and the reviews, by and large, were incandescent. Antichrist was accused of rampant misogyny; of being “an abomination”; “easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes film history”. Variety labelled it “a big fat art-film fart”. For the critics at Time magazine, the film “presented the spectacle of a director going mad”.

As it happens, there may be some truth to this last accusation. According to Von Trier, he wrote Antichrist on his sickbed while battling an epic bout of depression and conceived the tale as a form of catharsis. Small wonder, then, that the finished product is so torrid and unrefined, frequently preposterous and on the brink of outright meltdown. One might even argue that these very qualities are what make it so electrifying.

Von Trier is now back in Denmark, battling his demons in private. When I spoke to him last week, he claimed to have no immediate plans to make another film. Instead, he aims to lead the life of a convalescent, pottering gently around his garden. “It’s like an English country garden,” he explained. “It has little hedges around the lettuce and the onions and the cabbage. It has a greenhouse.” Undeniably, there is something endearing about the image of cinema’s ageing enfant-terrible trimming his hedgerows and tending his veg. It’s just that, after sitting through Antichrist, I now have an altogether different image of Von Trier’s garden. It is a place of slithering serpents and Arthur Rackham trees. Behind the greenhouse lies a dark, dank hollow, and on the lawn sits a garrulous fox.

Joanna Bourke Professor of History, Birkbeck College

Lars von Trier’s new film opens with heart-breaking lyrics of loss and longing from Handel’s Rinaldo opera. 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.

The theme of the film is an ancient one: what is to become of humanity once it discovers it has been expelled from Eden and that Satan is in us? Despite the erotic beginning, Von Trier has little interest in desire; his focus is on Sadeian extreme pain and enjoyment, the abject emptying of self and other (including the audience, who are made complicit in the sexual violence infusing the film).

Antichrist circles relentlessly around acts of transgression. The violence is defiantly excessive and beautiful. It is gendered, but more misanthropic than misogynistic. The man’s violence is the heartlessness of rationality. Patronisingly, he sneers at the woman’s research project on gynocide. He is a rationalist cognitive therapist, who bullies her into exposing her inner demons.

In contrast, the woman embraces the mysterious, uncanny energies of the unconscious and unknowable elemental forces. Her violence against the man and her own body is unbounded. The scenes of her crushing his penis and then snipping off her clitoris and labia are graphic. But it is not designer violence, intended to appall and titillate in the same breath. Neither does it inspire compassion. Von Trier simply presents cruelty as “there”, serving no liberating function for the audience. Pain – its infliction and its suffering – is integral to life.

Von Trier has admitted that, of all his films, Antichrist “comes closest to a scream”. It exposes us to an untamed erotic and aggressive aesthetic without redemption. It jolts us out of a passive voyeurism and, in despair, leaves us (in the words of Handel) crying over cruel fate.

Gillian Wearing Artist

This is the only film I have seen that clearly seems directed by someone with mental health issues. And I don’t say that in a negative way: 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. It is almost like a suicidal film – grief that can only be articulated through violence (female) or cold sterility (male). I sometimes wonder if Von Trier’s films have led to his nervous breakdown – the fact that he allows himself time and time again to go to the very dark side of human emotions to try to show us the tormented mind, and in this case getting the actors to enact his own demons.

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.

Julie Bindel Journalist and activist

Watching this film was like having bad sex with someone you loathe – a hideous combination of sheer boredom and disgust. I hated it, and I hate the director for making it. So, Von Trier was depressed a while back, had nightmares and decided to write the script of this atrocity as a form of therapy. Couldn’t he have kept it to himself?

No doubt this monstrous creation will be inflicted on film studies students in years to come. Their tutors will ask them what it “means”, prompting some to look at signifiers and symbolism of female sexuality as punishment, and of the torture-porn genre as a site of male resistance to female emancipation.

It is as bad as (if not worse than) the old “video nasty” films of the 80s, such as I Spit On Your Grave or Dressed To Kill, against which I campaigned as a young feminist. I love gangster movies, serial killer novels and such like. But for me they have to contribute to our understanding of why such cruelty and brutality is inflicted by some people on others, rather than for the purposes of gruesome entertainment. If I am to watch a woman’s clitoris being hacked off, I want it to contribute to my understanding of female genital mutilation, not just allow me to see the inside of a woman’s vagina.

If there is any justice in the world, this film would sink into oblivion. Aside from the risible script and potty plot, we have rubbish acting. Having previously loved Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I will now cross the street to avoid watching anything with them in. Apparently, both read the script and couldn’t wait to be in it. That makes them almost as bad as Von Trier.

If you see this film you will be putting your money into something which deserves to bomb – and give a grain of validity to the sickest general release in the history of cinema.

Linda Ruth Williams Professor of Film, Southampton University

I approached Antichrist with some trepidation. Lars von Trier first got my sexual-political back up with Breaking The Waves, a pernicious paean to female self-abnegation, which sees raped and murdered Emily Watson getting celestial postmortem applause as heavenly bells peal in the clouds above. This was a horror film in the true sense, I thought. Now I am not so sure. Von Trier’s tongue is often so firmly poked into his cheek, who knows where he’s coming from, or going to?

Antichrist is obsessed with bodies. Clearly, for all its in-your-face qualities, no one should approach it expecting a pornographic romp. There is a money-shot, but it’s bloody rather than ecstatic. Heavily referencing horror cinema, it’s marketed as the arthouse answer to The Blair Witch Project, 10 years on. Teen audiences marinaded in the conventions of “spam in a cabin” movies – monsters in the woods, out there where no one can here you scream – will feel at home with the creepy noises, buried bodies and innovative uses for a woodsman’s toolbox here. Yet Antichrist hardly offers the “dare you to watch it” thrills of popcorn horror.

For me, what is most shocking, and most interesting, is its frenzied meditation on sexual hysteria. Film academics have turned to horror cinema over the last 15 years because it reveals cultural sores, symptoms of our guiltiest pleasures and incomplete repressions. At best, horror shows that in our sex-saturated culture, the body, surrealism and the unconscious can still hold imaginative power. Yet the most familiar sub-genre right now is the production line of so-called “torture-porn” meat-fest movies. In the wash of multiple Saw and Hostel films, it’s hard to see the ideas-rich Antichrist as a serious danger to our moral wellbeing.

Last week, the Brazilian film Embodiment Of Evil opened in the UK, including scenes of somebody eating their own buttocks and a rat running up another character’s vagina. To my knowledge, no one has condemned this as the most obscene film ever made (in contrast with the Sun’s outrage over Antichrist). With films like that as a backdrop, I don’t find Antichrist’s intellectualised antics too worrying. If only tabloids campaigned against real clitorectomies, done on real baby girls, rather than fabricated ones done in fiction movies.

Of course, Von Trier probably doesn’t “mean” any of it. For all the ludicrous excesses of this story, it could all be seen as an extended grief nightmare. If Antichrist has a sexual political agenda, it’s probably just to stir things up. Von Trier throws us ideas, and we fight like dogs over them.

Samantha Morton Actor

Watching film is always a very personal experience for me; I understand the dangers mentally, emotionally and physically. The euphoria when the team achieves the “scene” in question, when the light is perfect, the words happen at the right time, the sound is like crystal, and everybody is happy to move on . . . It is hard to describe what happens when you’re alone, the scene just performed and your skin and nerves are tingling as if you’re cold turkeying from a drug. For this reason, I congratulate from the bottom of my heart Charlotte Gainsbourg’s performance. The grief portrayed was of profound honesty. She had, when needed, a vulnerability that was heartbreaking, and throughout her demise into madness she maintained integrity. Willem Dafoe amazed me with his tragic stillness and inner pain. The constant, intense battling of intelligent minds, mixed with the most horrific of circumstances, proved fascinating.

A director (if they’re worth their salt) will, and does, feel the pain of every moment of every character, be it behind closed doors or on set. A director pains over every shot, every inch of film, every breath of sound. Trying to communicate birth, fear, loss, death, religion, pain, love, desire, hate – the list goes on – is all-encompassing to the point of insanity. Deciding to make the film (or the film guiding you to make it) is an act of bravery and vulnerability, and sometimes of loneliness. The writer/director speaks through every character, so this film must have been incredibly painful to make.

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.

Jane and Louise Wilson Artists

This wasn’t really like cinema; it was more of an event. Watching it felt a bit like being in a trance. At one point, Von Trier shows the vein on the neck of Charlotte Gainsbourg and an extreme close up of the back of her head. The narrator talks about the dryness of the mouth, palpitations, sweats and pangs. Afterwards, you feel some of those things, including (for us) loss of appetite.

But parts of Antichrist are too absurd to be believed. You’re not sure whether it’s parodic or serious, especially when the fox speaks. The film was most powerful midway through, when the scene switched to the log cabin. Acorns bounce off the ceiling. Lichen grows over Defoe’s hand. Nature encroaches on the two of them. It’s as if they’re inhabiting a state of despair – and so are you, the viewer.

This film would work beautifully as an installation in terms of the camerawork. There is a scene in the shower where you can see Gainsbourg’s face, but you also see water droplets falling really slowly in front of her: it looks like a frozen moment. There is a very strange sense of depth. It was reminiscent of Bill Viola’s video installations. The effect is achieved by filming at high speed, shooting hundreds of frames as opposed to several. When the footage is played back at normal speed, you see all these individual frames of the one moment. There are some amazing shots: the deer attempting to give birth, for instance, and the scene where hands come out of the trees. But then another shot shows bodies in the undergrowth, barely hidden, and that, in its obviousness, pulls you away from the story.

Unfortunately, this film leaves you quite unfulfilled. It’s pretty damning about the whole of human nature. And, of course, the woman gets it in the end. Of all the to-dos you could have, there’s a demonised mother, a witch who seems to prioritise her own sexual fulfilment over the safety of her child. All of which made us curious about why Von Trier dedicates the film at its close to Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky’s demons were very different. The Russian authorities tried to censor his films. He spent his final years in exile from the home and family he loved. There is a density to what he does that transcends genre.