Here's a shocker: I love movies. All kinds of movies. Blockbuster movies. Independent movies. PG movies. Explicit movies. Movies meant for children and movies that stretch the limits of good taste. 

I will literally sit down and watch any sort of moving picture flashing across a cinema screen. I'm not promising that I'll like what I see, or that I digest film thoughtlessly, but I like to think that I give every movie a chance to impress me. My point is, I'm not against shocking cinema, and in my life I've watched a heck of a lot of films.

So when I was awarded a TIFF press pass with the Sid Adilman Mentorship Program, founded in 2007, I was blissfully happy. Last week I was editing the arts section of my campus newspaper...now I'm planning on attending press screenings of world class films until my eyeballs pop out of my head.

As the festival kicked off this morning and I perused my screening options, I whittled them down to two much-talked-about movies: Jennifer's Body, the sexy, gory, funny horror flick about a possessed cheerleader, written by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and starring the bodacious Megan Fox and Antichrist, by Danish auteur Lars von Trier. 

I had my qualms about the latter. I had heard that the film was disturbing, controversial and shocking. Was this really the best way to kick off my festival experience, and first-thing in the morning too? Yes, I decided. After the mixed reaction that met the film at Cannes, this is certainly one of those movies that people are going to be buzzing about for a while, whether positively or not. And so I decided to skip breakfast, swallow my worry and watch the film. That way, love it or hate it, I would have an opinion.

Antichrist chronicles a couple, known in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), through the aftermath of the death of their toddler son. Gainsbourg's character descends into a well of grief and guilt following the death, collapsing at her son's funeral and winding up in the hospital, drifting in and out of grieving consciousness. Eventually Dafoe's character, a psychologist, decides against the better judgement of his wife's doctor and the rules of his practice to take his wife's care into his own hands. Her doctor called her grieving process "atypical," but Dafoe insists that her deep sadness is perfectly normal; he leads her through the stages of grief calmly, even as she becomes more and more frenzied.

The turning point (and if you believe that it's for the better you're in for a sorry surprise) comes when the husband insists upon taking his wife to their cabin, Eden, a misnomer for sure, where she spent her son's last summer with him, so that she can face her growing anxiety and fear. Here is where the real nightmare begins. The wife's behaviour becomes more and more irrational, her outbursts more violent and her sexual appetite voracious, while her husband withdraws into his psychological theories, spouting platitudes but unable to connect to his wife as anything more than a complicated patient, while he begins to witness disturbing visions of his own in the woods.

When TIFF programmer Steve Gravestock wrote in his description of the film that "you most assuredly are not" ready for the film's graphic sequences, I took that as a challenge, but ultimately, he was proven right. For indeed, simmering tension between the couple, accentuated by a chilling soundtrack, Gainsbourg's alternating blank stares and fistful furies and deeply disturbing imagery exploded into something truly horrific at the film's conclusion. I tried to remain calm, cool and collected amidst an audience of industry and press, but more than once was forced to look away, if only for an instant. As I left the theatre, I was jelly-legged.

So why see the film? The fact of the matter is that, from a purely cinematographic standpoint, it is sometimes very beautiful to look at. If one is able to remove revulsion and the on-screen suffering of the film's characters from the equation (and yes, I found this to be difficult) each individual shot is carefully, richly and beautifully constructed. See it for that reason.

Antichrist is rich with symbolism and imagery that will not easily leave one's head. The overgrowing grasses outside of the couple's cabin and the woods themselves adopt a strange sort of ominous, sombre personality and things unroll in a surrealist, quick-paced, dreamlike state. I don't pretend to understand everything about the film, but I do know that it raises interesting and deeply disturbing questions about sexuality, which is always represented as perverse and desperate, the sexes, each one's traits (reason vs. emotion) over-exaggerated, and our relationship with nature, which brims with carcasses and constantly encroaches on the cabin. I don't know if the film is misogynistic, as some critics of it have accused, but I do know that it taps into age-old fears of dark magic, madness and our universal inability to control our emotions. See it for that reason.

See it as well for Dafoe's and Gainsbourg's performances. You wind up with sympathy for neither character, but that's a testament to their spot-on portrayal of reason to the point of madness and emotionality to the same, respectively. 

When festival co-director Cameron Bailey was asked at a press conference on July 14 why films are important, he said that this importance lies in discourse, in the ability of films to spark debate and fuel conversation between film-goers. I might never feel inclined to sit through Antichrist again, but I am glad to have seen it, to be able to enter its discourse. See it for that reason. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Antichrist will screen for the public tonight at 9:00 pm at Ryerson Theatre and on Sat. Sept. 12 at 9:00 am at the Scotiabank Theatre. If you're interested in a deeper understanding of the film than my slightly disturbed self can provide, check out the live feed of tomorrow's press conference with von Trier, also at the Scotiabank Theatre.