Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop; the operatic sex they were having at the time was something of a distraction. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward dealing with her grief, Dafoe, a therapist, convinces Gainsbourg they should retreat to their house deep in secluded woods (they call it “Eden”) so that he can teach her how to face her fears. Totally coincidentally, this house is where the wife used to go to work on an academic thesis on Gynocide — which the film defines as archaic and semi-mythic violence against women, witch hunting and like practices through which, as Gainsbourg’s character puts it, “nature causes people to do evil things to women” — before her husband dismissed her subject and thereby discouraged her ambition. Overcome with the guilty feeling that her own sexuality caused her son to die, the woman essentially internalizes the texts she’s studied and becomes an embodiment of the “evil,” manifested mainly through total sexual hysteria, that she once dedicated her life to critiquing. And hilarity sort of ensues!

Antichrist’s first image is of Von Trier’s name, billed in giant letters in front of the film’s title — as if he’s the star or, better yet, as if “Antichrist” is his professional title. This should be the first clue that the auteur is mocking the fact that his reputation — as a contrarian force amongst modern cinema icons, as a sadist who puts actresses through hell — will precede whatever he actually puts on screen. If he didn’t get his point across by literally spelling it out, the next hint soon follows. In the black-and-white opening sequence, composed with the aesthetics (and subtlety) of a DeBeers commercial, Gainsbourg and Dafoe’s husband and wife make earth-shaking love whilst opera drowns out the soundtrack and snow streams in through the open window like silver confetti. While the couple are distracted on the road to orgasm, their toddler son crawls out of bed and tumbles out the window to his death — arms spread like wings, an angel before he hits the ground. It’s a gorgeous sequence, if ostentatiously so, and right in the middle (at least, in the version of the film shown at Cannes) there’s a single, rather lengthy cutaway to a giant erect penis penetrating a vagina. There is a “Catholic” version of the film, which Von Trier prepared for sale to some markets, and though I haven’t seen that cut, I imagine this shot is not in it. As far as I’m concerned Antichrist isn’t really Antichrist without the Plunging Cock Shot (henceforth referred to as the PCS), but if it has to be excised, Von Trier might as well replace it with a shot of himself, winking at the viewer. That would be the PCS’s G-rated equivalent.

In a way, that wink already exists in more literal form than the Plunging Cock Shot (heretofore referred to as the PCS). In a full color handout given to press and potential buyers at some Cannes screenings, opposite a few uniquely blank excerpts from a Danish Film Institute interview with the director there’s a photo of Von Trier that seems to directly reference, down to the three-quarter profile with the smug facial expression, the famous publicity shot of Alfred Hitchcock turned to face a live crow perched on his shoulder that was distributed to promote the film of his that most directly drew lines between female sexuality and the unpredictable horrors of nature, The Birds. Von Trier alters the image a little bit: in his shot, the crow lies at his feet, dead. In other words, this time, nature’s not going to get away with it.

Even without that publicity image, Hitchcock is a natural reference for Antichrist, insomuch as it’s a psychological thriller that looks like art but satisfies as a work of genre. It’s essentially a revenge of the witch/bitch movie, one that stacks together a few basic horror movie themes: ancient burial grounds, mythology come to life, sex as a precursor to death, and female sexuality in particular as potentially equivalent to a supernatural force of nature. After touching on all manner of hallmarks of classic supernatural cinema, Antichrist finally flips the script of the modern gore fest by putting a relatively chaste man at the mercy of a female whose sexuality is in crisis, thus turning Carol Clover’s “final girl” theory on its head.

This may be bait enough for those quick to cry misogyny, but what I think is more remarkable is how far Von Trier goes to justify the woman’s eventual physical torture of her husband. Dafoe’s character deliberatly defies the advice of his wife’s doctor, takes her off mood-stabilizing medication and insists on giving her thereapy himself. He’s condescending to her about her creative work, her mothering skills and her grief. Even after it is demonstrated that sex helps calm her anxiety, her rejects her, joking, “Don’t screw your therapist.” This is Von Trier’s biggest nod to the basic building blocks of horror: after all, desire repressed always comes back around as violence.

You can put me on the “pro” side on Antichrist, although I’m not without my reservations. I’m certainly not offended by it, nor do I think other members of my gender necessarily should be, and the many attempts to declare it as “dangerous” strike me as more offensive than anything Von Trier actually put on screen. My main misgiving is that its second “chapter,” the first after the couple enter the woods, is kind of plodding and boring, which is a problem for a film that rides a very thin line between legitimate horror and total ridiculousness. Still, I can’t imagine it would have stirred up even a fraction of the fervor if anything shown thus far in competition could match its artistry. Gorgeous to look at and made with a confidence that towers over anything else I saw at Cannes this year, Antichrist frustrates attempts to dismiss Von Trier for somehow not knowing what he’s doing.

Of course, he knows exactly what he’s doing, and instigating that frustration is a big part of it. There was a great documentary playing in the Cannes market called Disco and Atomic War, which details the conflict between hard power, meaning the use of guns and bribes and such as a method of coersion, and soft power, which has more to do with the dissemination of images and ideas that have no real power on their own, but become extremely powerful by virtue of the fact that they make the people of a closed state want something outside of it, making heads of state fear the disruption of their ideological control. The doc uses the notion of soft power in talking about how the infiltration of Western pop and, particularly, the broadcasting of things like Emmanuelle and Dallas on Finnish TV, helped to erode the USSR, but it also offers one way to understand what has happened between Lars Von Trier and his detractors. With Antichrist, Von Trier is both mocking and interrogating the idea that images have the power to hurt the viewer. By stacking up so many concepts and actions almost guaranteed to offend prevailing highbrow taste, he’s essentially insuring that the offended will imbue his work with a power he himself knows it doesn’t intrinsically have. He may or may not be the best filmmaker in the world, but he’s the only one who really came out swinging this year, ready to fight a war.

Well, except for Uwe Boll, which brings us to Antichrist’s unexpected, but not inexplicable, embrace by the Fantastic Fest demographic. To the hardcore genre audience who have turned “Chaos Reigns!” into an all-purpose catchphrase, Von Trier’s winking presence plays as black comedy, as it should to any viewer unafraid to enjoy the goofiness of Von Trier’s spin on horror movie formula. Antichrist can only work as an affront to taste when it’s presented to an audience who thinks having their taste affronted is a bad thing. It’s a problem that so many critics fall into that camp.

This review is a re-write of a piece published during the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Antichrist opens in New York tonight at 12:01 AM, and premieres today on VOD.