If self-indulgence were an Olympic event, Lars von Trier would be Denmark’s brightest medal prospect. A film director loved — but also loathed — by Hollywood stars and the global art-house crowd, Trier (the “von”, like almost everything else about the man, is a student affectation) not only finds himself fantastically interesting, he demands that we do, too. So, his latest film, Antichrist, is the product of an attack of depression that he suffered two years ago. He wrote the script, he says, “as a kind of therapy”, and filmed it “without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half my physical and intellectual capacity”. Antichrist gets the antisell. He also describes it as a “childish film”, which suggests slightly more self-awareness than I gave him credit for.

Yet he doesn’t go far enough in trashing his own film. It is bad, very, very bad. It’s not bad because it con­tains some of the nastiest scenes I have ever seen — though it does. It’s bad because mere self-indulgence is not art. A hopeless ragbag of pointlessly pretty shots, hack metaphors, misogyny, undergraduate portentousness and plagiarised cinematography, it left me, by the closing scene, angry. The nastiness, meanwhile, is so nasty that it leaves one wondering what the British Board of Film Classi­fication (BBFC) thinks it is for. It may not be necessary — I’m agnostic about this — but, as it is there, how come Antichrist got an 18 certificate uncut?

Then, just as you think it’s all over, the film contains one final obscenity, which left me insensate with rage. On my way home from the screening, this shot almost prompted me to throw two bottles of wine through the window of Oddbins. I’ll come back to that.

My insensate rage puts me in good company. The Icelandic pop star Björk was so traumatised by working on Trier’s Dancer in the Dark that she ran away into the woods, ate her costume and vowed never to make a film again. “You can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick,” she said, “and still they are the ones that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier’s case, it is not so, and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work (with) soul, and he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming, and hide the evidence.”

She accused him of “soul robbery”. Nicole Kidman had interminable blazing rows with him on the set of Dogville, and Emily Watson was put through hell while making Breaking the Waves. Misogyny, see? To be fair, he has also messed with a few male minds. Paul Bettany, in Dogville, called the shoot “eight enormously long weeks in the most depressing place I have ever been to in my life”. John C Reilly walked off the set of Manderlay when Trier asked him to take part in a scene involving the killing of a donkey. Even people who like or admire Trier agree that he is unbelievably cynical, an adjective that crops up in almost every piece written about the man. So far, the stars of Antichrist, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, have not complained. They should. Here is the plot, in full, to discourage you from bothering to see it.

A couple are having sex (brief full-penetration shot) and their toddler son falls out of a window to his death. Wife cracks up, and her therapist husband takes her away to their woodland cabin — called Eden, geddit? — to recover. We think he’s being a cold sadist, but then the wife becomes the villain, smashing him in the genitals with a block of wood and masturbating him until he ejaculates blood. She then drills a hole in his leg and bolts on a grinding wheel. Later, she arouses herself while lying next to him and cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. He strangles her, burns her body and escapes through the woods, where, suddenly, he is surrounded by hundreds of children with their faces blurred out. The end. Oh, I forgot the fox that says: “Chaos reigns!”

When shown at the Cannes film festival, Antichrist provoked boos from the discerning and applause from the dimwits. A Daily Mail reporter asked Trier to “justify” the movie. “I don’t have a choice,” he replied, in his finest under­graduatese. “It’s the hand of God, I’m afraid. And I am the best film director in the world. I’m not sure God is the best god in the world.”

Critics have been, as usual with Trier, divided. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks decided he “loved it”. The Independent’s Kaleem Aftab called it a masterpiece, and felt impelled to hug Trier when he met him at Cannes. Mind you, Aftab also managed to find “no obvious reference to religion” in the film. Er, the cabin called Eden, the bolt through the leg (hint: crucifixion)? Jason Solomons, in The Observer, called it “ghoulish and nasty, an experience to en­dure rather than enjoy”.

What about the censorship? The nasty scenes are very, very explicit. Yet, giving it an 18 certificate, the BBFC’s director, David Cooke, said: “The film does not contain material which breaches the law or poses a significant harm risk to adults. The sexual imagery, while strong, is relatively brief, and the board has, since 1990, passed a number of works containing such images.” Damn, I must have missed them.

Antichrist and “harm risk”, however, are the issues here. It may be that mere films cannot harm people, or it may be that people should be free to harm themselves in any way they want. In either case, the BBFC is unnecessary and the law can deal with abuses such as child porn. Yet the existence of the BBFC is generally approved by the people, and therefore there is an institutionalised national conviction that harm can be done, and that people should be protected from it. Now the BBFC has concluded that a blood ejacu­lation (full, erect penis visible) and an auto-clitoridectomy (fully visible) are not harmful. This raises the question, what the hell is?

This, I acknowledge, is a tricky area. The year 1971 was a very bad one if you don’t like movie violence. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, with its graphic rape scene, was released, as were A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and The French Connection. In the face of this wave of cold, hard violence, even the moderate-minded proclaimed the death of cinema, while the more apoca­lyptically inclined warned of the impending death of civilised society. In 1972, a teenage killing was blamed on A Clockwork Orange, and on police advice, because of threats to himself and his family, its director, Stanley Kubrick, withdrew it from the UK. It re-emerged uncut only in 2001.

The shock and the anxiety seem quaint. By the standards of contemporary film violence, those movies are tame. Now extreme film violence has become so standardised, it has acquired its own ironic genre — see Sam Raimi’s hilarious Drag Me to Hell. But it’s not just movies. You can watch what you like on the internet, and much of it is real. The horrible death of Neda Soltan on the streets of Tehran is there on YouTube for all to see, with blood streaming from her nose and mouth. To my shame, the thought crossed my mind as I watched this: “It’s just like the movies.” Specifically, it reminded me of the slow, bloody killing of the Dutch girl in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich.

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