What actually happens
A therapist treats his own wife
The movie opens with an unnamed couple in their Seattle apartment while their baby, Nic, wanders up to the bedroom window and tumbles out of it. At the funeral the mother collapses, and she then spends a month in the hospital, flattened by grief. The father is a therapist, and he does not trust her doctors, so he decides to treat her himself. When she tells him her second greatest fear is nature, he takes that as a lead and plans exposure therapy at a remote cabin in the woods that they call Eden. She spent time there with Nic the previous summer, writing a thesis about the persecution of women. On the hike in, he meets a deer that is oddly unafraid of him, with a stillborn fawn half out of her body.
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A fox with an announcement
During therapy at the cabin, the woman gets more grief-stricken and more manic, and she often demands rough sex. The man starts to find the place sinister. Acorns hammer the roof, he wakes with a hand covered in ticks, and he runs into a fox that disembowels itself and hears it say "chaos reigns." Up in the dark attic he finds her thesis research, which includes violent portraits of witch hunts, plus a scrapbook where her handwriting gets frantic and then unreadable. She tells him that while writing she came to believe all women are inherently evil. He scolds her, and in a frenzied moment they have rough sex beside a dead tree with bodies intertwined in its roots. He suspects her greatest hidden fear is Satan.
A shed with a very bad tool selection
The scene people dread most arrives in the middle of the movie, in the shed. The man studies Nic's autopsy and the photos the woman took at Eden, and he realizes she had been putting Nic's shoes on the wrong feet, which deformed his feet. In the shed she accuses him of planning to leave her, has sex with him, and then brings a heavy block of wood down on his genitals. He passes out. Next she masturbates him until he ejaculates blood, and she drills a hole through his leg and bolts a heavy grindstone through it. She throws the wrench under the cabin. When he wakes alone, he cannot loosen the bolt and drags himself into a deep foxhole under that dead tree, where a crow is buried alive. Following the sound of the crow, she finds him, attacks him and partly buries him.
The Three Beggars come over
Night falls and the woman, now remorseful, digs the man up but cannot remember where she left the wrench. She helps him back to the cabin and tells him he can only die when the Three Beggars arrive. She also admits that she saw Nic climbing toward the window on the night he died and chose to let him fall, which she offers as proof of her own evil. Back inside, she cuts off her clitoris. The three visitors then show up: the crow for despair, the deer for grief and the fox for pain. A hailstorm starts, and the movie has already mentioned that women accused of witchcraft were said to summon hailstorms. He finds the wrench under the floorboards, she attacks him with scissors, and he manages to unbolt the grindstone.
The ending, explained
Once he is free of the grindstone, the man strangles the woman to death and builds a pyre to cremate her body. He limps out of the cabin and eats wild berries while the Three Beggars watch, who have turned see-through and glowing. At the top of a hill, in a bright light, he watches in awe as hundreds of women in old-fashioned clothes and with blurred faces file past him and keep walking into the woods. The man survives, and his wife and son do not.
The post-credits ruling
There is no post-credits scene. You can leave when the credits start.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, and no dog dies, though the other animals have a rough time.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is Antichrist scary?
Yes, Antichrist is an 8 out of 10. It has no jump scares. The fear comes from grief, graphic cruelty and a cabin where the animals behave strangely. It will stay with you for a few days.
How does Antichrist end?
The woman confesses that she let her son fall from the window, then attacks the man again. He strangles her and burns her body, then watches a procession of hundreds of women with blurred faces walk past him into the forest.
Does the dog die in Antichrist?
No dog dies in Antichrist. Animals do suffer in it: a deer carries a stillborn fawn, a fox disembowels itself and a crow is buried alive.
Is there a post-credits scene in Antichrist?
No. Antichrist has no post-credits scene, so you can leave when the credits start.
Who are the Three Beggars in Antichrist?
The Three Beggars are the crow, the deer and the fox the man meets at Eden. The woman says they stand for despair, grief and pain, and she tells him he can only die when they arrive.
