David Lynch’s step printed, slightly out of focus close-up sequences.

The black and white, at times slow motion sequences of Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom the film is dedicated.

The muted tones of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto Rosso ( Red Desert, 1964) of which Antichrist could be considered an update, the central character no longer simply neurotic, but psychotic. They recall a bevy of ‘art cinema’ classics. What is striking about Lars von Trier’s tale, biblical and bleak in an Old Testament manner, of a descent into the depths of suffering and desolation, is the beauty of its images. This is the bleak Jansenist life as hell without salvation of late Robert Bresson, the devil probably indeed. Hence Antichrist (2009), but not in the formulaic horror tradition of a demonic possession, but perhaps more appropriately an ‘ante-Christ’, a time and place before salvation could possibly be conceived. For if nothing else, this is the tale of a return to the fall, the garden of Eden post expulsion, and there is no question of turning back. Perhaps halfway into this apocalyptic fairy tale, an emblematic fox, taking Aesop’s formulation of sour grapes to its furthest point, tearing at its own innards, turns to “he”, the unnamed male lead played by William Dafoe, and mouths the words “chaos reigns”. The creative possibilities are always multiplying and branching out. That’s why it’s impossible to create masterpieces in the classical sense, but also what makes it so rich. You don’t need to know a work to be influenced by it.

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