by John P. Meyer

Surrealism and reality butt heads in this grimmest of grim fairy tales.

Lars von Trier's stunning new film Antichrist is strong stuff indeed. Whether you take it as a dark surrealist fantasy, a harrowing psychodrama, a nighmarish, impressionist allegory, or a horror movie with Biblical end-time overtones, you are likely to find yourself reflecting on scenes and events (and ideas) from the movie long after you've left the theater.

Antichrist is unrated, though if the MPAA ever got a pass at it there's no doubt that it would garner their NC-17 rating. That's because von Trier's camera (as helmed by Oscar-winning lenseman Anthony Dod Mantle) does not shy away from genitalia, which we find on display (in close-up) in various stages of arousal and torment.

We become aware of this in the first five minutes of the film, as the two unnamed protagonists -- played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg -- engage in a bit of high-style, super-slow-mo, shower-bath hanky-panky, as opera plays over their fevered coupling. This act of pure abandonment lays the groundwork for the theme of the piece, which involves bad things happening to seemingly ordinary people while their attentions are diverted. (Specifically, by sex.)

The film's presentation is rigidly structured into chapters -- including a prologue and an epilogue -- which sets up in sharp contrast to its dream-like narrative content.

After the tragic loss of their child, She (Gainsbourg) is predictably overcome with grief. We soon discover that He (Dafoe) is a practicing therapist, and that He disagrees with the treatment regimen prescribed by Her doctor -- which relies, He thinks, too heavily on ameliorative pharmaceuticals. She just wants the hurting to go away.

His controlling personality thus established, we soon find Her discharged from the hospital into His care; He begins a psychoanalytical attack on her depression, thereby sublimating his own feelings of grief and loss.

Analysis determines that Her fears center on the couple's cabin in the woods, which they refer to as Eden. He determines that the best way for Her to overcome her fears is (you guessed it) to confront them. So into the woods they go.

The Eden cabin, it turns out, is overarched by a massive oak tree, which drops acorns onto the structure's metal roof in randomized fashion. This results in a kind of maddening auditory Chinese water torture.

More unsettling still, something weird seems to be going on amongst the forest's animal population. This is first noticed by Him, when he glimpses a deer through the undergrowth. Upon approaching, He sees that there's a stillborn fawn half-emerged from the doe's uterus.

Before things are done, a fox will speak and a crow will emerge -- alive and well -- from burial beneath the ground of the fox's lair.

But all this is nothing compared to what's in store for the human contingent as we discover more about what She was up to on her last visit to the cabin. (She was, in fact, researching a book project on witchcraft.)

Terrible things are in store for both Him and Her, about which I will tell nothing more -- except to relate that genitalia come back into play with a vengeance.

There can be no arguing the fact that Dafoe and Gainsbourg turn in courageous (and periodically gruelling) performances that range beyond the established boundaries of acting; as the only two players onscreen for most of the film, it will perforce succeed or fail on their efforts.

The other star of the film is its imagery, which has been crafted in support of the notion that nature is imbued with a Satanic element. (Further, Nature and Satan are demonstrated to be in close connection; they may in fact be two reflections of the same terrifying reality.)

To this end, von Trier presents us with visions of nature that are disorienting and rife with hinted-at meanings: The colors are desaturated and oddly blue-shifted; pale aspen limbs form rune-like scrawls on the darkened chalkboard of their forest backdrop. Most effectively, von Trier's use of extreme slow motion bestows an otherworldly quality to dreams, remembrances, and altered reality.

Aside from the prologue and epilogue segments, which are scored with excerpts from Handel's Rinaldo, no music is employed in the film -- just ominous vibrational rumblings and chittering sounds of indeterminate origin.

That -- and there's something crying in the woods.

What do you think?