As I’ve been suffering from a minor case of death for the past few days I haven’t been out to enjoy a new film, instead I drew upon my collection of DVDs for some entertainment. This made me realise that last year I was silly enough never to mention Antichrist. Let’s see if we can correct that.

The story is strangely simple whilst maintaining quite complex undertones. Essentially it is a tale of grief. After the baby of a man and woman falls to his death whilst they are locked in, shall we say, a loving embrace, the woman struggles to deal with her grief. The man is a therapist and decides to help his wife by trying to get her over the grief. He finds that the only way to do so is to make her confront what she fears most.

So far, so normal. The thing is, this is a Lars von Trier movie. Lars tends to take nice, simple, film concepts and do something with them which is new and exciting. We have, in this film, something which owes a lot to the horror films that came along thanks to the cheap availability of hand-held cameras. There are elements of the alone-in-a-cabin films, and, as anyone who has heard anything about the film is probably aware, it owes a lot to the torture porn movement

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