Lars Van Trier’s latest film, Antichrist, created a storm of controversy when it was released because of its scenes of graphic sexual violence. Worldview film contributor, and director of Facets Multimedia, Milos Stehlik, says Van Trier succeeded in creating a lot of hype, but he’s no cinematic genius.

Lars von Trier has triumphed once again. With his film Antichrist, he got what he always craves – to be the center of attention, a kind of nasty prankster who’s always superior to his audience. Pressed for one adjective to describe von Trier’s relationship with his audience, I would call it “masturbatory.”

Like many of Trier’s films, in moments, Antichrist is a brilliant mess. At other times, it’s plodding and pretentions, brutally exploitative in pushing mutual and self-mutilation in your face — in gruesome detail.

There isn’t much plot. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe go to a secluded cabin called “Eden” to recover from the accidental death of their child. Dafoe, a psychotherapist, tries to bring Charlotte through the trauma of grief. But their relationship disintegrates, grows adversarial -- fueled perhaps, by mysterious evil forces surrounding them in the wild. In a single moment of unintended comic relief, a fox in the woods suddenly speaks the line, “Chaos reigns.” — Indeed.

Though Antichrist will leave you in disbelief throughout, the final coda comes at the end credits, in which Trier dedicates the film to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, that master of memory and humanism, who would turn over in his grave if he knew.

Trier is nothing, if not clever. He sucks the audience in at the beginning of the film as Gainsbourg and Dafoe make passionate love — a very erotic scene, shot in beautiful black and white – as their son climbs out of the crib, onto a window ledge, and amid falling snowflakes, tumbles to the sidewalk in slow motion. It’s a scene that’s almost breathtaking in intensity.

Similarly, the visuals in Antichrist – particularly the scenes of wild, green nature, as captured by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle who most recently shot Slumdog Millionaire, are packed with physical and visceral emotion.

Trier wants to shock the audience, and succeeds. But what, if anything, is he trying to convey except some vague allusion to his supposed personal depression? Many of us feel depressed, some clinically. Few go out and try to involve the rest of the universe in our state of mind. The cinema of Lars von Trier is a cinema of narcissism.

I don’t necessarily believe all of the noise that Trier brilliantly succeeds at creating around each and every one of his films, including Antichrist – be it his public temper tantrums, his neurasthenia, or the public exploitation of his traumas and fears. I don’t doubt that there is psychological substance there, but I also think that Trier is very smart at creating a theatre around himself, where he masterfully manipulates.

Underneath it all, I suspect, is the insecurity that he’s not the great cinematic genius he – and many of his believers – think he is. He’s smart and does his homework. Antichrist appropriates and re-imagines the techniques of what’s sometimes called Asian shock horror or Asian extreme cinema – a distanced treatment of extreme violence which relates to Japanese anime, and treats scenes which would normally be shocking with virtually deadpan attitude.

Trier’s success with Antichrist is helped by publicity about people fainting in the theatre while watching the film, as well as his own coy playing to the press. Ultimately Antichrist is reflective of our own times – when all the extraneous noise becomes more important than the thing itself. If revealed, this thing – as with Trier’s film - might just turn out to be completely empty.

Milos Stehlik’s commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or 91.5 WBEZ.