Lars von Trier is a true poet of cinema. He has a painterly eye for composition --formal, surrealistic, and radical. In a natural setting of a remote cabin named Eden hidden deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, von Trier scorches his mark with one of the most shocking horror films of the past 30 years. The Danish filmmaker creates a tense and provocative collage of death, brutality, psychotherapy, sexual desire and the fury of Mother Nature. A symphony of simultaneous madness afflicting the females of various species of animals parallels the mental deterioration of a wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) after the death of her son -- who fell out a window while the couple was making love. Dafoe's therapist husband tries to head off his wife's teetering nervous breakdown with therapy exercises and goal-oriented games that amplify her fear of staying at Eden. His insistence that they go on the retreat to face her fears and heal her leads to all sorts of symbolically evil events that surround Gainsbourg as a sexually aggressive and violent wife.

Von Trier toys with implying an archetypal status to Dafoe's husband, referred to only as "He," and Gainsbourg's character, credited as "She." "He" is a logical person, who substitutes the remorse he feels for the loss of his child with curing his deeply disturbed wife -- nay witch -- even if such an effort contradicts ethical concerns for his professional duty as a psychoanalyst, that would prevent him from treating a member of his own family. "She," on the other hand, places importance on sex as a way of distancing herself from the result of the activity that was responsible for bringing her son into the world and for inadvertently casting him out.

After its press screening at the New York Film Festival, I asked von Trier about the implications of the film's biblical references, such as naming the couple's isolated retreat "Eden" and an oblique reference to "Satan." The candid filmmaker replied that if anything it was to reject the existence of God. Von Trier has publicly discussed his battle with depression that led to writing Antichrist as a kind of self-therapy before filming the movie with a lazy approach that took full advantage of employing free association to add or augment scenes. The auteur sites Strindberg as an influence, and you can recognize it in von Trier's formal distillation of social and personal ideas. Antichrist is broken into three stages, "Grief," "Pain," and "Despair." But the terms play so loosely with the action of each act that the superseding action on display challenges the audience to equate the horrors on-screen with traumatic events in their own lives.

Like Luis Bunuel, von Trier works from a rich subconscious narrative landscape where adult fears and fantasies are played out beyond their illogical parameters. Where a film like The Exorcist works on a corollary algorithm pitting good against evil, von Trier embraces the cruelty of nature, with its psychological frailty and physical vulnerability pressed hard to the fore. That he does so within an intimate romantic context that calls into play furious aspects of sadomasochistic sexuality that fire the film into an area of implacable volatility.

Antichrist is a demanding film that pushes its dark ideas and exaggerated situations through a dialectic of carefully guided precepts. As with Alfred Hitchcock, Lars von Trier deploys a direct cinematic language that allows the audience to trust in his mastery of filmic art, as well as his ability to gross them out without breaking their confidence. Von Trier is a master filmmaker. His exploration into the genre of horror has given us a film far more frightening than anything Hollywood would ever allow. As with all of von Trier's films, there's some Dogme for the audience to chew on. If Antichrist is the "most important film of von Trier's career," as he has stated, then there is all the more reason to savor it.

Rated R. 109 mins. (A) (Five Stars)