( CNN ) -- An infant falls to his death from a second-story window while his parents are making love . Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe star in the Lars von Trier drama `` Antichrist . '' The mother ( Charlotte Gainsbourg ) is consumed with grief and guilt . She 's hospitalized and sedated for days and weeks before her husband ( Willem Dafoe ) , a therapist , insists she return home . He gets rid of all her medications . He will be her partner and her grief counselor , and he will see her through this , if only she will place her trust in him . Not a good idea for either of them , as it turns out . Halloween is nearly upon us , but `` Antichrist '' is a mighty strange kind of horror movie , a wrenching psychodrama for two-thirds of its running time before collapsing into a steaming heap of deranged sadism and supernatural symbolism in the outrageous third act . The movie 's peculiarity can be accounted for in three words : Lars von Trier . The Danish provocateur twice won prestigious honors at the Cannes Film Festival ( with `` Breaking the Waves '' and `` Dancer in the Dark '' ) and re-energized European art cinema in the 1990s with the Dogme movement 's so-called `` Vows of Chastity . '' It 's not often that an art-house director takes up the implements to make a horror film , and for a while , `` Antichrist '' compels with its anguished intensity and audacious stylistic choices , not least the severity that keeps the focus exclusively on this man and woman , neither of whom is named . The prologue -- the child 's death -- is a luxurious , slow-motion rhapsody of explicit sex , black-and-white photography and baroque music , commingling with the infant 's almost ersatz tragedy and finding perfunctory counterpoint in banal close-ups of the family 's washer-dryer . ( There may be a deliberate echo here of the famous sex scene in Nicolas Roeg 's `` Do n't Look Now , '' a far more keenly calibrated examination of grief succumbing to the supernatural . ) Dafoe and Gainsbourg are riveting as the ill-matched couple . He 's an implacable rationalist , urging her to confront her fears and venture into the darkest recesses of her psyche . She 's not sure he 's ready to share that torment with her . Their bitter , sometimes sourly funny back-and-forth fleetingly echoes the railing , pugnacious and remorseful men and women we find again and again in Strindberg and Bergman . Of course , when those great Scandinavian dramatists wanted to shock us with the ferocity of the battle of the sexes and show a married couple going at it tooth and nail , their only weapons were words . Mindful that he 's up against `` Hostel , '' `` Saw '' and the like , Herr von Trier ups the ante considerably . Hiking to a log cabin in the mountains to uncover the apex of his wife 's fears ( it could be anywhere , but let 's imagine we 're in the neighborhood of Burkittsville ) , the doctor 's little experiment in exposure therapy ends in crushed genitals and , uh , worse . Much worse . It 's safe to say von Trier knows this climax is over the top : `` Chaos reigns ! '' announces a fox , in perfect English , just as the movie goes off the deep end . Chaos reigns all right , and Gainsbourg 's traumatized mom is transformed nonsensically into a raving psycho witch-bitch . This director has often been accused of misogyny for the punishments that befall his heroines -- spuriously , in my opinion . But this time the boot is on the other foot , and for once the charge seems to stick ; no matter that the first half of the movie suggests Dafoe 's smug therapist is due for a comeuppance . Apparently someone had a seizure when the movie showed at the New York Film Festival recently . When I caught up with it at the Vancouver International Film Festival two weeks ago , the screening was punctuated with the single loudest shriek I 've ever heard in the theatre -- that would have been when Gainsbourg gets out the scissors for a spot of ad hoc auto-surgery . There also was a very vociferous walk-out : a gentleman who fairly barked `` You get what you pay for , folks '' as he made for the exit a full 20 minutes before the end . That unhappy camper had a point . Either von Trier is barking up the wrong tree , or he 's pandering to the basest instincts of an audience that 's seen it all before and still demands more , more , more . Beautifully shot by Anthony Dod Mantle and acted with raw conviction , `` Antichrist '' is a calamitous atrocity from a major filmmaker , nothing more and nothing less . If you do n't believe me , go ask the talking fox . `` Antichrist '' is not rated and runs 104 minutes . For Entertainment Weekly 's review , click here .
` ` Antichrist '' has met with vitriolic reaction at film festivals . The von Trier film stars Willem Dafoe , Charlotte Church as troubled teenagers . It goes from moody to over - the - top and graphic . To CNN.com 's Tom Charity , the film is a ` ` calamitous . ''