There are many accepted, more conventional choices for horror films to watch with your paramour this Valentine’s Day. You could unwind with a horror-comedy like Lisa Frankenstein or Warm Bodies, or take on a Valentine’s Day slasher like My Bloody Valentine or Heart Eyes. You could even delve deeper into pure romance with something like Spring, or get Gothic with Crimson Peak.
But what if you’ve done all of that? What if you and your fellow horror-loving partner are after something more daring, something unconventional, something maybe just a little dangerous?
Then make this the Valentine’s Day you watch Lars von Trier‘s divisive masterpiece Antichrist together. Yes, really.
Antichrist is many things. An art film. An extreme horror gauntlet. Grief, horror, and folk horror joined in unholy matrimony. At its core, though, the film is a dialogue, an exploration of the raw emotional baggage of two people in love, and what happens when the power dynamic they’ve grown so used to starts to morph and crumble in their hands. The plot’s quite simple: A man (Willem Dafoe) and a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg), reeling from the accidental death of their toddler son, retreat to Eden, their woodland cabin, for what’s meant to be a therapeutic journey of healing.
He (Dafoe is only ever credited as “He,” and Gainsbourg is “She”) is a respected, determined therapist who believes his intimate knowledge of his wife will help her overcome her grief, anxiety, and outright fear. She believes he’s only doing this because, now that She’s a panicked, weeping mess, He finds her interesting for the first time.
They go to the woods, to Eden, specifically because She confides in her husband that Eden is actually the seat of her fear, despite her previous enjoyment of the place. After weeks of panic attacks, depression, and bouts of hungry, angry sex that She uses as a momentary distraction from her grief, He decides that exposure therapy is the only thing for her. They must go to the rotten core of her fear, revel in it, and come out the other side cleansed. In theory, anyway.
Written amid Von Trier’s own deep depression, Antichrist is about a lot of things, and you can find many different throughlines in its layered, forest-thick narrative. Psychotherapy is, obviously, a big factor, as is grief, and repression, and sexual violence, and the very nature of evil. But what the film does best, what it does most powerfully, lies in its portrayal of two people who love each other testing the absolute limits of that love and devotion, to see if they survive.
Love and fear are dark sisters, and I don’t just mean in fiction. If you love someone, truly love them, then you constantly live with the fear, however distant its hum might be, that you’ll lose them. It’s not a matter of insecurity or even the nagging sense that you’re going to make a mistake. We know because we understand the natural order of the world that loss can come at any time, in any circumstance, and the film reminds us of this in its opening scene, an excruciating and operatic explosion of grief out of nowhere. Love might be the dominant emotion, but fear is always there, tickling the backside of our brains, and like the characters at the heart of his story, Von Trier wants his audience to confront it head-on.
For all its darkness, I don’t consider Antichrist to be a cynical film, or one bent on shock above all else. Its characters, these two stand-ins for every couple in the world, the Adam and Eve of this cursed Eden, are sincere in their desire for progress. He wants to help his wife, and She wants to find a way out of the black cloud that chokes the breath out of her every time she thinks of her son. These two people are trying, confronting the tests the world throws at them, attempting to push past obstacles. They are united by these efforts, even as the horrors of the forest begin to divide them.
I won’t say more about what waits in those woods for fear of spoiling the film for new viewers, but even at its darkest, Antichrist is a film about thought-provoking questions couched in universal horror. Both of these people are terrified, in different ways and about different things, but they’re united in their pursuit of answers, even if they never come. At first glance, it’s not romantic, but the more you place yourself into these characters, the more you start to realize that there’s arguably nothing in the world more romantic than trying to understand someone you love, even if it costs you everything. Antichrist is about how harrowing and terrifying that pursuit can be, but because it’s a work of fiction, you and your loved one can sit back and process the questions it asks, and the conversations it provokes, from a safe remove. It might even make your relationship stronger, if only because you feel far less damaged than these two deeply wounded people.
Is it an easy watch? Absolutely not. Will it make you feel warm and fuzzy? Probably not. But because love and fear have always walked together, hand in hand, it is a rewarding one, and it’s deserving of the bold gambit that is watching it on the most romantic day of the year.
Antichrist is currently streaming on Kanopy and Mubi.
