The Antichrist
A tragedy which overshadowed the life of Ippolita Oderisi, she was twelve years old when, driving at night, her father’s inattention to the road ahead of them resulted in the car leaving the road and bursting into flames, her mother killed and she confined to a wheelchair, now a woman in her early thirties who along with her younger brother Filippo still lives in the palatial family home, treated like a child and full of resentment and unfulfilled desires.
Attending a religious ceremony where she staggers and stumbles before an icon which she had hoped to cure her, it is the belief of Doctor Marcello Sinibaldi that the trauma is mental rather than physical, that she is suffering from what he calls “a reincarnation trauma” which is traced to an ancestor of the same name who was accused of being a witch and tried, his attempts at regression hypnosis not freeing Ippolita of her burden but instead opening her to a full possession by a demonic force.
Released in late 1974 in the wake of The Exorcist which had debuted less than a year before, there can be little doubt that The Antichrist (L’Anticristo, also known in some territories as The Tempter) of director Alberto De Martino was intended to cash in on the global success of the former with many parallels between the two, even if the actual exorcism scene itself is surprisingly brief and ineffectual, instead focusing on scenes of religious fervour in which the disenchanted sobriety of Ippolita (Carla Gravina) is at odds with the madness of those around her.
A woman cursing and howling before lapsing into calm but exhausted silence when forced to touch the icon, a man escapes his captors before he is forced to do the same, hurling himself from the rocks to his death in full view of the crowds amassed in the rain; nobody does devotional craziness like the Catholics do when in Rome, and next to it Ippolita’s dreamlike recollection of the Satanic initiation orgy of her novitiate nun namesake is strangely stately and dignified despite the blood, goats and squeezed toads.
The fundamental subject matter sufficiently shocking to the conservative mindset of the period to produce a reaction, The Antichrist is very much a film of that time devoid of lingering threat or menace and entirely dependent on a reflexive instinct of revulsion and rejection which no longer exists, the elegant mansions full of paintings and sculptures beautiful and the classical architecture of Rome a stunning backdrop against which Ippolita is a lost soul wandering the chambers and cloisters, her demonic transformation just the external manifestation of privileged woman who is already selfish and ungrateful.
Also starring Nightmare City‘s Mel Ferrer as Ippolita’s apologetic father Massimo, Fantastic Voyage‘s Arthur Kennedy as her concerned uncle, Bishop Ascanio Oderisi, Voice from the Stone‘s Remo Girone as Filippo, flitting about ineffectually, The Damned‘s Umberto Orsini as the unorthodox Doctor Sinibaldi and The Final Programme‘s George Coulouris as Father Mittner, seen throughout the film shaking a collection box in what passes as foreshadowing, The Antichrist joins StudioCanal’s Cult Classics collection in a flawless new restoration supported by archive audio interviews with De Martino and a featurette on De Martino and composer Ennio Morricone.
