Antichrist: Lost children, love, and the fear of excess

Abstract

Antichrist (2009) by Danish director Lars von Trier is emotionally exhausting. Apart from feeling somewhat depleted, my experience of the film was coloured by two distinct yet interlocking aspects of what I’ll call the lost child. The first relates to the struggle of negotiating and transcending culturally inscribed forms of femininity that inhibit female agency. Not only does Antichrist’s central protagonist internalize traditionally accepted gender boundaries, but she psychologically regresses, locking herself into a childlike state and lashing out when confronted with the spectre of a more fully realized self. The second response stems from the enduring lost child scenarios of my country, Australia, where the synthesis of love, pain, and violence that accompanies the death of innocents/innocence is clearly one of the most revisited traumas since European settlement. This chapter will argue that the overarching concept of the lost child complex reverberates through both Antichrist and the Australian cultural landscape. In this conflation, the lost child might be metaphorically understood as an internal ghost with its own autonomy, unable to transcend the sense of threat that drives its power to haunt.