(sorry, server made me split my comment into three parts!)

Graimito is right when he/she says academic writing is not special if it doesn't communicate its points effectively but this passionate thought piece by the CLF does quite the opposite (for me), despite not being a piece of academic writing anyway.

The CLF makes many, many relevant and astute points. Bradshaw should be held to account for forsaking constructive analysis for flexing his lexicon, the wider mediated reception of Von Trier and this film go a long way to justifying von Trier's clearly satirical communication strategies outside of the film and Von Trier's rigorous, inventive and multi-faceted unpacking of 'misogyny' does not make him the misogynist the sulphuric reviews would have you believe.

Von Trier is demonstrating and articulating through this film not only an intimidating awareness of the different audience segments involved, his own psychological make-up and career, but the confluence of debates surrounding film theory/making/viewing (Mulvey looms large does she not), film canons and genre, cinema history and heritage, theology, adaptation and tragedy. That is a hell of a list and I'm probably not even touching the sides.

Film is quite hard to review without context.
Horror, beauty, violence, all are descriptions that have little meaning alone.
In the context of the adverts with “shock” hyped reviews I had seen previous to the film, I can only think the context must be a little tongue in cheek.
And in the context of Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, the tragedy is never conveyed with the same depth nor is there the same level of emotional engagement we have in the characters.
The opening scenes, if they are beautiful, are not in the same way that Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance, might be considered is beautiful. There is a black humour, a nod to the fact that all tragedy is a slow motion conclusion made inevitable by the fact we have named it a tragedy.
As the film has just started, we have no emotional engagement with the couple we see making love and therefore what we see is a blow by blow account of what happened, we experience the tragedy of the event through the reaction of Gainsbourg’s character as the film unfolds.
That said, the film is graphic and it does shock, but to me it deals with horror and violence more as a concept than in their visual state.
I am quite squeamish, and yet I didn’t find this film as horrifying nor violent as I had expected, and where the gore is depicted it feels restrained, tame even. The scenes are more shocking when described than they are when seen, something I doubt escaped Von trier.
Unlike most “horror” genres, the violence is depicted with realism, happening in a type of unreality. In terms of being hyped as a film that uses shock for shock's sake, actually it wasn't (thankfully!) and it didn't upset nor shock me in the same way that the recent remake of Last Turn on the Left did, a film I found far more violent, distuburbing and unrelenting, a film that in my mind went too far.
For me the most shocking moments in Antichrist were the moments of realisation, like when Dafoe is in the outhouse/shed and discovers what is at the top of Gainsbourg's list of fears, and we begin to piece together why that might be.
That spine chilling moment when the lines of sanity and madness, grief and horror are blurred and you ask yourself, "is she actually evil? Did she put the shoes on wrong by mistake, or deliberately?"
In that second, where what you think you know about her character is replaced by a doubt, you ask yourself "would she do that?".
And I suppose that question becomes the crux of the film, could you do that?, "that" being whatever it is that you are afraid you could be capable of. That, which whilst in the throes of grief and despair, especially of depression, it is so much easier to believe, "yes I probably would".
Gainsbourg becomes what she believes she really is, overtaken and at the mercy of her grief and despair. A monster, a kind of antichrist. All ability to rationally consider the pain of others is overwhelmed by her own, overblown, emotional state. Despair, grief, depression, they rob you of your humanity.
And in trying to bury his own pain and grief in an attempt to help heal hers, Dafoe also loses his humanity and ends up snuffing her out.
This surely alludes to the common situation whereby no matter how much someone may protest to want to be there for another during their grief or depression, in reality it is often impossible to bear with them as they hit the lows and all too often we want to hurry them toward wellness in an attempt to keep our sanity.

And that is just it, horror, violence, tragedy, they live in primarily in our minds and in the sense of the context we give them.
Who would have gone to see a film about the tragedy of loss and the de-humanisation caused by grief, depair and pain, if it had not been given the context of shocking, sexualised violence?
Perhaps to be depressed or stricken with despair is a modern condition that has become almost stereotypical and one which the audience cannot emotionally engage with. Or perhaps that cynicism is the context that Von Trier found himself in whilst writing this film, in bed isolated and suffering from a depressed state.

Honey Monroe