This is a rapturous occasion, shot in glittering monochrome, featuring slow-motion closeups of the conjugal act, and stirred by the dolorous strains of a Handel aria. An unnamed man, listed in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe), and his wife, otherwise known as She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), are in the bathroom of their family home, busy doing It. We begin at the deep end, with copulation and death. Better by far to see the movie now, and thus to establish, under less seething conditions, if the provocation was indeed a mere flourish of perverse P.R., or whether it remains an essential part of some more solemn design. After all, the giving of offense has long been the stock-in-trade of its writer and director, Lars von Trier, the man who brought us “Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” and “Dogville.” This year, the new film was jeered to the rafters at the Cannes Film Festival, although the energetic snagging of attention is as hallowed a Cannes custom as the hiking of prices in the local seafood joints. It would be a shock if “Antichrist” had turned out to be anything but shocking.
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