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.
Once you have seen it
Look at what covers the attic walls. (setting)
Witch-burning images, an unfinished thesis on the historical killing of women, handwriting that degrades as the pages go on. She studied the persecution and then came to believe what it claimed.
Payoff: One room reframes everything before it and changes what her grief has been made of.
Track how each chapter narrows what is still possible. (structure)
Grief, then pain, then despair, and the cutting grows more violent as the couple come apart. Nothing gets recovered and nothing gets reversed between one chapter and the next.
Payoff: The film runs downhill by design, so the cure was never available in the first place.
Watch the grindstone, the wrench and the scissors before anyone uses them. (setting)
Von Trier plants ordinary objects around Eden early and lets them sit in the background of scenes. In the last chapter the argument between reason and instinct gets carried out through exactly those things.
Payoff: The debate stops being spoken and gets performed on bodies with hardware from the shed.
Listen for Handel returning in the epilogue. (sound)
The aria that scored the overture comes back over faceless women moving through the woods. Between those two points the film has no music at all, only breath, screaming and forest.
Payoff: The beauty comes back unchanged by everything in between, which is how the film makes beauty read as indifference.
Carry this in: Listen to the acorns on the roof. The husband hears noise to explain away. The film hears the woods answering.