That makes the relatively bloodless torture scene from Audition all the more interesting. (Alistair Ryder)įans of director Takashi Miike know him as a master of überviolence in Japanese cinema, having helmed the 2010 remake of 13 Assassins and the highly controversial Ichi the Killer. But by bringing torture porn to its most graphic extremes, Von Trier ensured that the genre became obsolete and that there was no longer anything that could be proved to be more shocking. In fact, it may very well be the worst sequence in the film, one that seems to be included to cause controversy in the way Von Trier, the shameless self-publicist, is known for. Understandably, the graphic mutilation of both male and female sexual organs caused considerable controversy and in many ways undercuts (no pun intended) the surrealistic despair that comes before it.
It is here where her erratic behavior reaches fever pitch, leading to the most hard-to-stomach sequence in the entire cycle of torture-porn movies. The couple visits a cabin in the woods as solace for the grief, where the husband discovers that his wife’s thesis study is on the subject of genocide. In the prologue that opens the film, we see an unnamed married couple (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) have sex while their young child accidentally falls to his death from the balcony window (a brief glimpse of full-penetration from porn actors is shown during this sequence, offering the viewer a little porn before the physical and emotional torture to come). Confessing that he had been suffering from depression while writing the screenplay, Trier ended upbringing torture porn to its logical conclusion by taking the title of the sub-genre all too literally and creating a macabre near-masterpiece out of trashy genre origins. With Antichrist, Lars Von Trier attempted to write a film that dealt with his personal demons. As far as horror subgenres go, torture porn is up there with found footage as the most understandably reviled by audiences.
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