Antichrist; if you’ve seen it you’ll know how “controversial” it is, if not then just search for it online and you’ll get an idea that the politically correct can’t handle a movie that’s more about imagery than it is about in your face dumbed down storytelling.

After the death of their child a man and his wife (they remain nameless throughout the movie) deal with their loss, the wife deals with it badly and falls into deep depression.  Her husband a therapist decides to pull her away from her doctors and taken her to Eden, a cabin in the woods where they have travelled before.  This is a place the wife is scared of and the husbands belief is that if she faces her fears she can pull herself out of the depression she feels.  Once they make it to Eden it seems that nature is against them and is trying to send them into madness.

That is the basic plot of the movie, but what the movie actually is is an examination of how deep and dark depression can actually be.  Yes, it has explicit sex scenes and strong violence which includes sexual violence.  Some critics have questioned why there is no explanation of this violence and why is it so explicit? The question is why they cannot work that out for themselves.  If they forget about being so shocked for the sake of being shocked can they not look at the characters motives and work it out for themselves?

I’d say this is a movie where you form your own views and understanding on what is being shown to you.  You see the events through the eyes of both the husband and the wife and if you open your eyes you see the explanation.  You are given the evidence as to the woman’s insanity as well as the man’s (because in my opinion the husband is just as depressed as the woman but he lives his illness through his inability to cure his wife).  His wife who blames herself for the death of the child manifests her hatred of herself into the hatred of woman as a form, hiding in her research she once did that women were seen as evil.  She (being a woman) see’s the evilness she once argued against within her and sees herself as the personification of a that was argued to be evil within women.  This is not true of course but it is her illness that makes her believe it is.

Nature is the catalyst for both the husband and the wife’s downfall into insanity.  As a fox says to them “chaos reigns” and that is exactly what the movie is saying, that between these two people chaos does reign.  The one thing they have together that gives them any kind of happiness is sex, which is why they appear to do this so much.  They are fighting for the happiness that they can no longer find.  The fact that violence comes between this happiness is just another manifestation of the process in which they are going through.

It surprises me that when people open their eyes and take notice of what’s going on in the movie there is a meaning between all of the scenes in the movie.  I could watch it again and come up with a whole new theory based on the nature theme within the movie.  This is why this movie interests me so much, it is open to interpretation by the watcher and that is something we do not often see from Hollywood (and of course this is very far away from being a Hollywood movie).  So if you watch this movie watch it with your eyes open and not shut.  If all you are going to do is complain about explicit sex scenes and violence then you have missed the point completely and should stick to the Saw series for your entertainment.