Where the wild things really are

There. Is anybody left?

To you hardy band of survivors, representative of the 1 percent of the filmgoing population that really does want to be challenged, “Antichrist’’ may (I say may) be a psychosexual drama of profound and primal impact. Or it may strike you as Lars’s nasty little joke on us all. Like a nightmare you recall during waking hours, and then only in its vast outlines, “Antichrist’’ has the power to haunt beyond words. For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema. On at least one level, it’s also hateful.

Divided into four chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, “Antichrist’’ begins with a toddler falling from a window to his death while his parents make love in the next room. In slow-motion black-and-white, with Handel blaring on the soundtrack. Pretentious? You bet, but no risk, no reward, and at least the gloves are coming off early.

In the first chapter, titled “Grief,’’ He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) relocate to a cabin in the woods to work through their sorrow. He’s a therapist, the very model of enlightened male rationality, ecstatic at the notion of helping his wife. She’s an academic whose area of study is the persecution of witches in medieval times. The cabin is called Eden, nudge nudge, but if Dafoe’s character is our Adam, Gainsbourg is channeling someone much older and more primeval - Adam’s mythological first wife, Lilith.

The details of where “Antichrist’’ goes from here are not my business to tell you, and, anyway, how do you quantify a fever dream? The mystery of what’s ailing Gainsbourg’s character deepens further and further, into nature and prehistory, and von Trier’s command over his craft is unyielding. The images have the silvery patina of a grim fairy tale; the pacing tugs you forward like a current; in some scenes the edges of the screen itself seem to buckle.