And it does.
Unfolding in three chapters ("Grief," "Pain" and "Despair"), with a prologue and an epilogue to add insult to injury, Antichrist begins with its two and only actors, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as a couple in the throes of heated intercourse. They're making love - in the shower (a disturbingly grungy bathroom), in the laundry room, in the living room - while their happy baby clambers out of its crib, gets to the window, and topples out, falling in beautiful black-and-white slo-mo to its death on the sidewalk below.
Bring on Chapter One.
Dafoe and Gainsbourg are He and She. He's a psychiatrist. She's writing a doctoral thesis - on the evils committed against women through history. At the cemetery, at her baby's funeral, she collapses. She's weak with sadness, with rage, with this awful loss. And although it's mixing the personal with the professional in unsound ways, he decides to lead his wife through the healing process - offering pat observations about the stages of mourning and even helping her conjure up an image of "thistle blooms" to calm her during a panic attack.
No wonder she's losing it: The guy's smug, and shallow.
"You're indifferent as to whether your child is alive or dead!" she snaps at him. (Snapping only as a Dane writing in English can snap: i.e., "as to whether . . .") And then they're off to Eden - their idyllic cabin in the forest, although the trees and the grass are scaring her right now. And rightfully so. The place is acrawl with creepiness: animals that bear dead fetuses (and talk), the gnarled roots of trees looking like entwined limbs of human corpses. (Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in Copenhagen, though.)
