Antichrist

• Von Trier wrote the script in 2006 while hospitalized for severe clinical depression, barely able to work — Antichrist became the opening chapter of his unofficial Depression Trilogy, followed by Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013).
• Charlotte Gainsbourg won Best Actress at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, yet the same festival's Ecumenical Jury handed the film a special 'anti-award' as the most misogynist movie; jury president Radu Mihaileanu said the film suggested 'woman should be burnt at the stake so that man can finally stand up.'
• The unsimulated penetration shots use porn-actor body doubles, not Gainsbourg and Dafoe. Von Trier said Dafoe specifically needed a double because his own anatomy 'confused' everyone who saw it on set, and Dafoe later confirmed a porn actor stood in so it wouldn't 'become a distraction' and all anyone discussed.
• Eva Green was considered for the female lead but her agent refused to let her take it over the graphic sexual and self-mutilation content; Charlotte Gainsbourg got the part instead and won Best Actress at Cannes for it.
• The black-and-white, slow-motion prologue — the toddler Nic falling to his death while his parents have sex — is scored to Handel's aria 'Lascia ch'io pianga,' the lush opera music deliberately clashing with the horror on screen.
• The film is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky; when that dedication card appeared at the Cannes premiere, the press audience reportedly broke into laughter and catcalls, and around a hundred people had already walked out during the screening.

The cabin named Eden, the husband as a presumptuous authority who thinks he can fix everything, and the wife's collapse into a belief that women are inherently evil read as a deliberate inversion of the Genesis Fall — von Trier stages the husband's rational 'therapy' as the original sin, the act of a man arrogant enough to think he can master nature and grief by force.

Gainsbourg's character may not have descended into evil so much as been broken by her own scholarship — her thesis on gynocide and witch-burning, the autopsy photos showing she'd been putting their son's shoes on the wrong feet, suggest the forest didn't corrupt her; it surfaced a self-loathing that mainstream society had already taught her to carry, with the closing march of faceless women implying she's one casualty of centuries of the same accusation.

The three beggars — deer, fox, crow, embodying grief, pain, and despair — function as the film's real engine: the husband keeps trying to argue Eden into submission with charts and exposure exercises, but the animals announce that none of it can be reasoned with. The talking fox's 'Chaos reigns' is the thesis statement, the moment the film tells you intellect has no jurisdiction here.

A toddler falls from a window while his parents have sex. The mother collapses into grief; her therapist husband, certain he can treat her himself, drags her to their forest cabin called Eden to confront her fear head-on. Out there, the woods turn against them. A self-disemboweling fox declares chaos reigns, the dead rain from the trees, and the wife's research into medieval witch-burnings curdles into something she may have believed all along. What starts as exposure therapy ends in mutilation, fire, and a procession of faceless women.