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Like a feverish letter in tiny crabbed handwriting, Antichrist is a cry from the soul from a deeply troubled man.
That much, at least, is part of the public record.
Lars von Trier has talked at length about the debilitating depression he suffered while filming this aggressively shocking, scattershot tale of a husband and wife's descent into madness after the death of their toddler.
He apparently still isn't over it, but he's willing to share it. Antichrist is the opposite of a day-brightener (infamously, there were walk-outs when it debuted at Cannes).
There also isn't anything in this film to dispel the filmmaker's reputation as a misogynist -- from the stylized "T" in the title that's actually the symbol for "woman," to the madness that eventually hinges on the wife's investigation into witchcraft and paganism.
In this regard, Antichrist reminded me of nothing so much as a rawer version of The Shining, more explicit both in violence and sex.
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There's even a moment that rather obviously evokes that movie's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" scene.
Whether the "supernatural" elements in Antichrist are real or a product of fevered imaginations working in concert (the movie does finally lean to one over the other), this is a movie that posits womanhood itself as a malevolent force of nature.
As the movie opens, the couple we will come to know only as He and She (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are having sex, as they will many times in the movie, with varying degrees of passion, anger and ill-intent.
As they couple, we see a toddler blithely following an impulse to climb to an open window, and we see a stylized fall.
It's a disturbing beginning (reminding us of just how transgressive depicting the death of a child remains in movies today), in a movie replete with disturbing images and events (two words -- "genital mutilation").
The psychological horror touches ground at home, where Dafoe's psychiatrist character takes it upon himself in his arrogance to break with ethical tradition and treat his wife himself for her apparent numbness and failure to grieve (he exhibits, more or less, the same symptoms which seems beside the point to him).
For her part, Gainsbourg's character's ennui is gradually revealed to predate her child's death, being a response to the time she'd recently spent alone at the family cottage ostensibly to write a thesis on the history of women, witchcraft and paganism.
So, it's off to the scene of the psychosis, as it were.
In her place, close to nature, a change comes over Gainsbourg, making her sexually aggressive and, later, subject to bouts of outright madness.
For his part, Dafoe begins hallucinating sinister visions (including, infamously, a talking, rotting fox that actually evoked quite a few nervous laughs at the Toronto International Film Festival screening I attended).
Antichrist is not an accessible film in the North American sense, and it's certainly not any kind of breakthrough on Von Trier's part.
But for those who care, it should generate a fairly spirited post-screening debate on the subject of "What's wrong with this guy?"
Of course, that's if you feel like talking at all.
(This film is rated R)