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Lars von Trier’s disturbing film was the most controversial film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Reactions were love it or hate it. The French reviewers who lean toward art films generally loathed it, while American reviewers were the most kind. Some called it torture porn. Others complained it was violently misogynistic. I found it a brave, unblinking decent into the abyss of the worst of human experience.

The story begins with He (Willem Dafoe, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1996’s JANE EYRE) having passionate sex. It’s snowing outside and their young son crawls out of his crib to get a closer look out the window. The child falls to his death. She sinks into unbearable grief. He is a therapist who doesn’t agree with the way the doctors are treating his wife and decides to treat her himself. He forces her to confront her greatest fears. The scariest place she can now imagine is their cabin in the deep woods called Eden, where she spent the previous summer with her son working on her thesis about gynocide. The more callously He pushes her, the more disturbed she becomes, which leads to violence both mental and physical.

The film is too complex for one reading. But the Biblical implications are obvious. The story takes the Adam and Eve tale and projects the negative onto the screen. Instead of being cast out of Eden, they journey to it. The garden is not a paradise, but Satan’s playground full of chaos. Birth is simply the start of death.

In this world, we have He and She. Their attempts to get over grief and pain only create more grief and pain. They are extreme examples of the standard perspective of males and females. Dafoe makes He cold, analytical and controlling. Gainsbourg crafts She as emotional, sensual and easily persuadable. In the Biblical account of Eden, Eve eats of the apple and gains knowledge. The same is true in the dark Eden. She studies the history of the gynocide of women. The torture of women as evil. Consumed by guilt, she starts to believe that women are evil. As she becomes more unsettled, He begins to believe it too. Self-hate and blame consume them and it is what tortures them.

Dafoe and Gainsbourg sink into their characters. Dafoe is calculating and aloof. He wants to forget the tragedy as quickly as possible, but he can only do so if his wife does the same. Gainsbourg brings real emotional torment to her role. Most will be struck by her unflinching dedication to the extremes of part from the sex to the nudity to the violence. But it’s the despair that seems more daring. While their characters are made up of extreme traits, they play them naturally. Their honesty allows us to believe in the story. They are real no matter what surreal occurrences happen around them.

Von Trier has never been shy to shock his audience. The black & white prologue shocks with its graphic sex cross cut with impending tragedy. Later he delves into torture and self-mutilation that would make HOSTEL fans cringe. But he’s not taking on any topics that Ingmar Bergman didn’t address decades ago. All he does is push the imagery to extremes. He shows what others wouldn’t. I believe he’s challenging himself as much as his audience.

Von Trier, who borne the Dogme 95 film movement of simple, natural films, breaks all those rules in this film. The entire film is artifice. The woods are full of surreal special effects. The trees pulsate. He and She make love in the forest and arms come out of a tree groping for them. Acorns rain down from the trees onto the cabin’s metal roof like a natural audible water torture. A deer gives birth to a dead fawn. A buried crow refuses to die. A fox disembowels itself and calls out, “Chaos reigns.”

What drove von Trier to make this film? Whatever it was he was uncompromised in its vision. Many of his films have dealt with man’s inhumanity to man. Innocents preyed upon by a cruel world. But are their innocents in this film? The son was an innocent. He and She were engaging in a passionate moment of love when a cruel twist of fate thrust grief, pain and despair on them. It could happen to any of us. How we react depends on whether we live in a world made by God or Satan.