Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (2009) is a film about a couple that loose their son and retreat to a cabin in the woods. Coping with grief the mother receives psychotherapy from her husband and they go to the place she most fears: Eden, where she spent the last summer with her son while writing her thesis on Gynocide.
The film explores the (historical, mythological) belief of the evil nature of women. The female character studies the historical persecution, torture and killing of women, and the archaic theories on the evilness of their nature. Her memory of the woods, isolated with her child, engrossed in her thesis, and surrounded by the evocative atmosphere of the woods, begins a psychological process instigated by her feelings of guilt and loss. The circumstances in which she lost her son, the fact that the sexual act coincides with the baby's death, triggers the association of her sexuality with evil doing, she blames her lust for his death, for not being the protective and nurturing 'good' mother. She begins to believe and construct the 'female evil nature' within herself.
As Katarine Park explains in Secrets of Women, the Middle Ages held the idea of the 'wise women', old experienced women who held practical knowledge on female sexuality and health, from prevention of pregnancy to abortion. This practices and women (the witches) were damned and the male physicians were to gain the monopoly over women's reproductive lives, focusing on virginity, fertility and chilbearing (or better said son-bearing) in the interests of the patriarchal family. It is in this dichotomy of the witch lustful and sexual versus the good mother-wife that the character tears apart.
The episode of self-mutilation shows her cutting her genitals, in an attempt to 'castrate' that sexual evil instinct. There is a split between the cutter, equiparated with the mother and her rational side, aiming to control and subject her body-her lustful side. The genitals become the embodiment of evil, that she attempts to remove from her self in a literal way.
