Lars von Terror (Trailer Watch: Antichrist)

The trailer for Lars von Trier’s new film Antichrist has just hit the net and eewww, it looks creepy. In one scene Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg appear to be having sex at the foot of a massive tree, its roots entangled in a heap of naked bodies (perhaps this post would have been better placed in Rooted). Von Trier or the marketing department or both seem to be quite fond of this image as it appears in the trailer, the production stills and on the background of the film’s official website. Let’s hope the script wasn’t written around that one shot, because the last time somebody made a film structured around the image of a really trippy tree the results were not pretty (Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain).

Given Lars von Trier’s track record of fiercely alternative noodle-scratching cinema (The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, etc.), Antichrist may mark something of a turning point given it appears to be, by a long shot, his closet yet to a straight-up genre film.

Here’s the official synopsis:

A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse…