Director outdoes himself with ‘Antichrist’ — and not in a good way

It’s torture! I refer both to what happens in “Antichrist” and to the experience of watching it.

The most controversial film to come out of the major film festivals this year, the latest from highly skilled sicko Lars von Trier may be his most off-putting exercise in deliberate outrageousness yet — and that’s saying something.

Ever since his best film, “Breaking the Waves,” the flamethrowing Danish writer-director has been devising ever more deviant/explicit ways to make actresses like Bjork and Nicole Kidman play at suffering relentless mental and physical abuse. This time Charlotte Gainsbourg is put through the ringer, as is Willem Dafoe in this trippy two-character piece about a bereft couple.

She is so unable to get over the accidental death of her toddler that her therapist husband (Dafoe) takes her into a haunted forest to confront her fears.

Even though it may spoil the intended shock value, potentially sensitive audience members should be notified: This is an adult film, unrated by the MPAA. It opens with an extreme, porn-style close-up of sexual penetration. And after numerous scenes of emotional torment, the climax hinges on lingering shots of each of the characters enduring hideously freaky kinds of body mutilation.

Unfortunately, these moments add heat but no light to the drama, which is divided into chapters labeled Pain, Grief and Despair.

Misogyny in particular and human destruction in general, these are Von Trier’s fetishes. He trains his malevolent gaze at female pain in the name of awareness. Making matters worse, certain cineastes help to rationalize that his movies revel in women’s agony for their own good — that the filmmaker is really just trying to expose in heightened metaphor the subordination of women in society by inflicting it on them so vividly.

Today’s film does stir passions and demonstrates gutsy acting and a thinking director’s expertise as a technician. The indelible imagery he designs and the way he is able to suck us in, that power cannot be denied — even if he is using his gifts to suggest that a nameless, grief-stricken mother is the representation of evil. Or, at least she is an antichrist according to ancient Christian superstitions that the script references. Meanwhile, the shrink who provokes her? Well, he stands for justice and exposing her evil.

Challenging ideas, yes. But button-pushing isn’t necessarily art, even when done artfully. It’s Von Trier who needs a shrink … and a moral compass.