Lars von Trier. Not a name immediately associated with dark horror and extreme violence, but rather with European independent cinema and the Dogme ’95 movement. With his latest film, Antichrist, Trier has stayed away from the shaky camera, gotten himself a crew and two of the best actors of their generation, and made the most explicit, terrifying and surreal film of the last 10 years, steeped in horrific symbolism and unremitting brutality. I loved it.

Films like this don’t come along too often, and when they do, I don’t believe that they should be condemned or scorned, but rather genuinely celebrated for breaking boundaries and pushing the medium as far as possible. Trier starts his film with one of the most beautifully crafted scenes I’ve ever witnessed, a slow motion montage of sex and death, shot in black and white with an incredible, operatic score, it’s a work of art in itself. This is the prologue, so says a painted sign, and is followed by three chapters and an epilogue.

The set-up is fairly straightforward; a nameless couple living in Seattle, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, have lost their son. The child simply climbed out of the window and fell, while they made love in the next room. ‘She’ is devastated, falling into a coma for a month and waking to find her husband by her bedside. ‘He’ is an analyst, and insists on treating her with grief counseling; sets of simple tests and exercises designed to help her cope and come to terms with what happened, and likely to aid himself in the same vein. He asks, “What is your greatest fear, right now?” Her response is, “Eden”, the cabin up North where she last spent a summer with their child, and where she worked through writers block on her thesis, a critique of books on witchcraft.

At his insistence, they travel to Eden and begin to work on more exercises, but strange things happen. The house is below an Oak tree and acorns rain down on the roof all day and night, she starts to behave erratically and insists that she’s cured, while he remains skeptical and tries to stay rational in the face of her collapsing sanity, and the danger to his own.

This all makes Antichrist seem somewhat allegorical, the divide between man and woman, science and nature, rationale and madness. The film uses visceral, sexual imagery and extreme violence, yet has some of the most beautifully shot scenes of a haunting forest, shrouded in mist and evoking the darkest fears of humanity, the unknown and the supernatural. Like Defoe in the film, the audience isn’t sure if what’s happening is real or imagined, how seriously we should take the threat and hint of something unreal, until the film reaches a crescendo of horror, with mutilation, sexual violence and an ending as enigmatic and bizarre as one could expect from such an unapologetically twisted film.

Watching Antichrist, I tried to think of other film-makers that have gone this far. Other films that threw down the gauntlet and made their mark as unflinching examinations of humanity’s capacity for imagined violence and horror, while retaining a respect for the medium of film, and seeking to capture people’s imaginations and stay with them for days, if not weeks afterwards. Masters of the surreal such as Lynch, Jodorowsky, Svankmajer, Herzog, Ferreri, Bunuel, and even Aronofsky; film-makers who treat the inclusion of violence, sex and death in their work very seriously, and seek to examine the possibilities.

Critics have already become divided. Jason Solomons of The Observer writes, “It is utterly pompous, stilted and boring.” He thinks, “Shock is the only possible attraction because the rest of the film is nonsense.” He clearly doesn’t share my opinion, that when a film is this daring, and creates this much buzz it should be viewed with an open mind and a deep, deep breath before heading in, and ‘nonsense’ it most certainly isn’t, there is a gripping supernatural plot that made perfect sense to me, scaring me senseless in the process. He also gave away a spoiler about ‘the scene’, that’s ‘shocked’ so many, but for me the film as a complete package is near perfect, and it’s childish to dismiss this as not ‘having earned the right’, as Soloman drones.

We’ve had Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo, and the one film that this might owe it’s biggest debt to; Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’. These kinds of films are few and far between, pushing the envelope, raising eyebrows (and covering eyes) in the process. Now we have Antichrist, and it may be an unpleasant journey into madness and an experiment in fear, but it’s a bloody powerhouse of a film and very much the genuine article. A packed cinema of press entered, a round of applause followed, and, stumbling into the sunlight afterwards, legs weak and hands shaking as they tried to light a cigarette, all I could do was let out an almighty, 'fucking hell!'