Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Antichrist
2009 · Lars von Trier · Antichrist on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for the acorns hitting the cabin roof. (sound)
There is no score once the couple reaches Eden. Kristian Eidnes Andersen builds the forest out of designed sound, and the patter on the roof keeps returning, night after night, seed after seed.
Payoff: The sound tells you the woods are making more of themselves all night, tireless and indifferent to the people underneath. In the reading: originary-world. The reading hears an originary world in that sound, a savage layer of pure drive running under the ordinary one.
Compare the black-and-white prologue with the first scenes at Eden. (camera)
The overture is monochrome slow motion, shallow focus, every droplet legible, Handel pouring over it. At the cabin Anthony Dod Mantle goes handheld and desaturated and lets focus drift off faces.
Payoff: The film runs two incompatible looks, so beauty and decay are textures you feel against each other rather than ideas. In the reading: movement of world. Bodies going still while the world keeps moving around them is what the reading calls the movement of world.
Look at how the forest sits behind the actors. (setting)
Selective focus isolates hands and faces while the woods blur into something unreadable behind them. The clearing, the roots and the groaning trees stay present at the edge of nearly every frame.
Payoff: The place is not scenery. It presses on the couple in every shot they stand in. In the reading: derived-milieu. A real place the film keeps peeling back to show a wilder one underneath is what the reading calls a derived milieu.
Notice the chapter titles and the quick strange images between scenes. (cutting)
Anders Refn and Asa Mossberg partition the film into named chapters and then push flash-frames and brief grotesque inserts into otherwise naturalistic scenes, often too fast to describe afterward.
Payoff: The structure names its subjects out loud while the inserts build dread before anything overt happens.
Watch how calm Dafoe stays while treating his wife. (performance)
He is a therapist running his own wife as a case: correcting her sentences, setting exercises, scheduling exposure. Gainsbourg plays against that steadiness with nothing held back.
Payoff: His composure is the film's version of arrogance, and you can watch it fail while he keeps using it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Listen to the acorns on the roof. The husband hears noise to explain away. The film hears the woods answering.