Writer-director Lars von Trier clearly likes to push emotional buttons almost as much as he loves to make films.
For more than a decade now, he has managed to keep “shocking” movie critics and arthouse audiences in a pop cultural scene where you would think everyone has long since been shocked-out.
Hard core porn is popping up everywhere you look. Do a Google image search for almost any famous personality — with the “safe” function off, of course — and the chances are pretty good that you will see something XXX-rated or, as the Internet kids would say, NSFW (Not Safe For Work).
If you go to see an R-rated horror picture, the chances are pretty good that you will see extended torture sequences with limbs being lopped off right and left and gallons of blood spilling all over the place.
So, how is it that so many seasoned reviewers and New York Film Festival-goers professed shock at the sexual and violent material in von Trier’s latest provocation, “Antichrist”?
Yes, a sheltered, computer-less, elderly person living in Middle America would probably have a coronary if he or she accidentally wandered into a theater showing this explicitly sexual and violent tale of a couple tearing each other apart (figuratively and literally) in the wake of their only child’s accidental death.
The movie has stirred up tremendous controversy and the explicit content has caused a severely curtailed U.S. release. (In Southern Connecticut, the sole theatrical booking so far has been at the Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven.)
It must be the eccentric mixing of genres that has provoked so much outrage — the fact that von Trier starts the movie in a fairly realistic manner and then escalates into gruesome violence and frank sexual content (the director used doubles for his stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe for the most graphic sexual moments).
Von Trier clearly wanted to experiment with the idea of modern horror film special effects grafted onto intimate psychological drama (the same way he blended elements of Hollywood musical comedy into the grim tale told in his “Dancer in the Dark”)
My problem with “Antichrist” was not in the blunt visual material, but in the way the movie drifts from the tragic drama of a woman who isn’t getting the psychiatric treatment she needs into a finale that is straight out of “Saw VI” or “Hostel 2.”
It is so easy to empathize with the Gainsbourg figure in the first half of the 
movie — she is ailing and her therapist husband is foolishly trying to treat her himself without any medication — that the sudden shift to the woman being portrayed as a bloody avenging angel is too jarring to make sense.
Von Trier falls into the same trap that ruined the final scenes in “Fatal Attraction” — portraying a sick woman as a monster who must be destroyed.
