BENNETT INVENTORY : That Moment

Antichrist -- Eden

Women are inherently evil. This being a thesis drawn from a character desperately trying to disprove her own mental instability. If the entire gender can be lumped together then she's merely accepting her fate. She's safe in her thoughts and decisions and completely and more than that, she's perfectly sane.

A man and his wife take refuge in the woods after experiencing the loss of their only child. The man, being a therapist, is posed with the challenge of curing his spouse of her grief. But with a man so weak in his understanding of his wife and a wife so tormented by her own guilt, it's like the blind leading the blind and they wind up leading each other straight to their own personal hells.

Lars Von Trier uses images that are naturally nightmarish such as a disemboweled animal to illustrate how cruel mother nature can be, but then gives these disturbing images a surreal quality that paralyzes you with its unpredictability. The man spends the entire film trying to be a step ahead , but remains two steps behind with each revelation coming as a greater trauma than its predecessor.

The human mind does not come apart in one quick move. Hell is experiencing pieces of it breaking off like the arms off of a ceramic figurine with no means to glue it back together. You're left with just a limbless shadow of its former self. The audience bears witness to the woman's irretrievable breakdown in a flashback as she witnesses her child jump out of a window and does nothing to stop him. This standalone scene separates this entire film from every film for the past two years giving it preeminence above the rest.

The woman ultimately proves that people are inherently insane. It's our responsibility to never cross that line and disappear. Most of the time, you can never come back. And in the case of this man and this woman, their only peace is found in violence and cruelty.

-Jess