If asked, “Did you like it?” careful how you respond. You could be accused of taking pleasure in watching delicate body parts compromised with household items and garden tools. And maybe you’ve never even seen the Saw or Hostel series. But with chapters labeled Grief, Pain, and Despair whether you “like” the film is relative. Anti Christ is audacious film-making filled with arresting and poetic images and provocative questions about the politics of power and sexuality. It imagines whether grief, pain, and despair are states of mind or whether they exist in nature itself – a question that supports Lars Von Trier’s own peculiar romanticism.

The inciting incident is a beautiful set piece: an artfully photographed and very graphic, black and white, slow motion, lovemaking scene during which the couple’s child escapes from a crib, clears from a table three statuettes – labeled grief, pain, and despair – and climbs up on the table and over to a window. Then, in exquisite slow motion, like an angel ascending to heaven, – the child falls to its death.

“He” (Willem Dafoe) is a psychologist whose dominating and inappropriate counseling of his own wife “she” (Charlotte Gainsbourough) ) Dafoe leads her to the place where she is suppose to confront the thing she fears most – the deep, dark forest. “Nature is the devil’s playground” she says. She ought to know. She’s written a thesis on witchcraft in ancient times with a collection of prints depicting inquisitional torture – mostly of women. She has come to the interesting conclusion that perhaps women actually can be truly evil, that women with their carnal desires and potentially wild natures are inherently dangerous creatures. Thank you Lars Von Trier!

From Breaking the Waves to Dancer in the Dark to Dogville and Mandalay, statements about Von Trier’s own misogyny are old hat. He also doesn’t like America much. It’s not a place that embraces his eccentricity and provocations. America also doesn’t like to be criticized. Is it possible he is actually protesting demeaning and oppressive attitudes toward women, maybe with particular emphasis on American patriarchal values? It’s not Von Trier who abusive, but the social circumstances in which his women find themselves.

At one point early in the film the wife, as if suddenly possessed, no longer fears the woods. She becomes liberated and healed. But “he” and his psychotherapy won’t let her go. His “scientific” approach has to dominate. Big mistake. Horror ensues.

Being America, the story is a lot more reminiscent of Hester Prynne and Pearl than it is simple misogyny. I remember being told in college that when Hawthorne’s wife finished reading A Scarlet Letter she went out and threw up. This liberation, this nature business was all too much! Women’s “nature” begins in Wicken (Hester Prynne), which is defined as evil by society (the Puritans, Inquisitions), and descends into madness and delusion (the suppression of their nature). Von Trier who converted to Catholicism says “Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen”. But if the Anti Christ does exist then there are horror movie consequences, complete with mortification of the flesh, redemption, souls released from purgatory. Checkout the amazing final unexpected image.

Von Trier has moved from the theatrical sparseness of Dogville and Mandalay to real woods replete with portentous talking animals, hideous nature, hailstones, constellations, heavy fog, and a reappearing fox, deer, and crow that I assume might represent man, woman and death. They echo a statement about children’s stories made earlier in the film. It’s a huge stylistic change and with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) they have created some fabulous images. It swings between fairy tale and the fantastic, between Shelley Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theater and Saw.

In a particularly horrific/child-like moment, the ‘fox’ intones:” Chaos Reigns”. Perhaps – but “Anti Christ” churns chaos into poetry.