By DAVE KEHR


On some level Lars von Trier’s films are always about humanity’s desperate need to impose order on chaos, to make sense of a violent, irrational universe.

Perhaps because Mr. von Trier is at once an incurable optimist and an inveterate ironist, the forces of order usually seem to win. At the end of “Breaking the Waves” (1996) giant church bells appear in the heavens to announce the ascension of the film’s saintly, self-sacrificing heroine (Emily Watson), an image as silly as it is sublime. The equivalent moment of rhetorical excess in his new film, “Antichrist,” is very different and much darker. In a primeval forest, a fox takes time out from gnawing on its own exposed entrails to turn to the camera and hiss, “Chaos reigns!”

That scene, along with a few others involving explicit sex and graphic violence (sometimes both at once), earned “Antichrist” whistles and catcalls when it was screened for the press at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where the film won a best actress award for Charlotte Gainsbourg.

But “Antichrist” is more than adroit provocation. In some ways it may be Mr. von Trier’s most emotionally exposed film, one in which he relinquishes his formal mastery and habits of control to enter uncharted and uncensored territory. This new strategy wasn’t entirely deliberate.

“I started a long time ago with the intention of making a horror film,” Mr. von Trier said, speaking from his home in Denmark, “knowing full well that if I make a horror film, it won’t be a real horror film,” any more, he said, than his musical, “Dancer in the Dark” (2000), starring Bjork, was a “real musical.”

“I started that, and then I got this stupid depression,” he said, referring to an illness that left him incapacitated for six months in 2007.

“It was very important for me to do something straight away and something hard,” he said about emerging from that cloud. “My experience with anxiety and therapy was unfortunately quite big, so that became very quickly the theme.”

“Antichrist” is the story of a woman (Ms. Gainsbourg) who blames herself for the accidental death of her young son. With her husband (Willem Dafoe), a cognitive therapist, she retreats to a cabin in the woods with the hope of working through her debilitating grief. But rather than a source of calm and comfort, the forest manifests itself as an infernal maelstrom of grisly death and feverish reproduction.

Seeing herself as another “bad mother,” Ms. Gainsbourg’s nameless character identifies with this nature and descends from depression to insanity. “Nature is Satan’s church,” she proclaims, before moving on to acts of worship that will repel some viewers.

Where did all this come from? Mr. von Trier said, “The closest I can come to talk about it is the kind of romantic thing I had with Strindberg,” who, like Mr. von Trier, is a Scandinavian artist often charged with misogyny. “I do not hate women myself,” he said, “and I doubt that he did.”

He added: “But my problem is of course also that I’m the son of my mother, who was the feminist movement chairman of Denmark at a certain point. So I think that I made many of my films just to provoke her, even though she’s dead.”

Ms. Gainsbourg has her own diagnosis of Mr. von Trier. “He puts women on a pedestal,” she said, “and then pushes them off, but I find that quite brilliant. There is a lot of mystery around his female characters. I can see the fear of women, but there’s no hatred.

“Of course he pictures her as the devil and all that,” she said of her character, “but he pictures himself as the devil. To me there’s a real link between him and the character.”


Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won a best actress award at Cannes, as a tormented couple in “Antichrist, a film by Lars von Trier.