If you are after serious and powerful drama, Antibodies is a film to look out for.  It is very tough going but is well worthwhile on many levels.

Some introductory quotations indicate a theme, especially one from Dostoievski who said that if God does not exist, then everything is lawful.  The God and good and evil theme pervades the film, especially in its focus on a Catholic village with its surface respectability, its high ideals and its ignoring of the dark side of human nature.  But that is not all.

The film opens with a portrait of a very mentally disturbed serial killer and his arrest.  When he is interrogated in hospital about his crimes, he begins to play mind games with the police.  In the meantime, we are shown the village and its part-time farmer/policeman.  One of the murders has taken place here and there is a pall of suspicion that disrupts his family life: the policeman himself who wants to solve the crime, his brutal father-in-law, his kind and patient wife, his precocious thirteen year old son.

How writer-director Christian Alvart connects all these characters in overt story and in subtle ways means a very intricate screenplay which leads the audiences in many directions.  The director enters into the mind of the killer and plays mind-games with us.  We are led deeper into the possibilities of evil,  We are really shocked by some of these possibilities, hoping against hope that they are not the reality but finally believing that they are – only to discover that we, like some of the characters, are the victims of grotesque malice.

On the level of serial killer investigation, the film is excellent.  When we are thinking Silence of the Lambs, the killer himself makes explicit the comparison and differences.

On the level of characters who try to live exemplary lives being taunted, then tempted, then insidiously influenced by evil insinuations, the film is an appropriately demanding cautionary tale, with a descent into the realms of passionate sexuality and violence.

On the level of explicit reference to some Catholic traditions, the film is powerful.  There is a strong confessional sequence where the priest, in good faith, goes through the proper motions without any pastoral concern besides clarifying aspects of the sinfulness.  He shows no awareness of the penitent’s need, not merely for the words and even the meaning of absolution, but the need for atonement, some kind of expiating suffering that seems in some proportion to the evil committed.  And, when some Our Fathers and Hail Marys seem too glib and easy a penance, then mortification and self-inflicted pain seem to be the only proper action.

As the film reaches its climax, a sermon by the parish priest on Abraham sacrificing Isaac, is voiced over the action raising all kinds of biblical questions of interpretation as well as highlighting the nature of God, compassionate or cruel.

This is the kind of film that Graham Greene, Bryan Moore and other writers with tormented Catholic backgrounds and searching would really like and appreciate.

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