COLUMNISTS 
Not for the first time, Lars von Trier has made a film that has shocked the world. The Danish director has scandalised audiences in the past, whether through his raw treatment of sexually explicit themes (The Idiots), politically charged allegories (Dogville), or a mischievous tendency to twist apparently innocent genres into more sinister territory (Dancer in the Dark).
But Antichrist is something else again. The film opens in the UK this weekend garlanded with lurid adjectives and a proviso that is the closest the film industry gets to a health warning: “contains strong real sex, bloody violence and self-mutilation.” In May, at a post-screening press conference held in Cannes, where the film won a best actress prize for Charlotte Gainsbourg, there were rare flashes of temper from the floor, to which von Trier reacted with icy disdain.
