Dafoe discovers the remnants of this project in the attic. We later learn that Gainsborg’s aborted thesis project has something to do with a feminist response to the witch trials. These creatures are referred to as the three beggars and come to represent pain, grief, and chaos. As a coping mechanism it turns out to be an abysmal failure-which is not shocking considering the satanic role sex is playing in the movie.Īs this perverse therapy session plays out in the forest of Gainsbourg’s fears, we meet the corporal manifestation of evil-as-nature-itself, as three animals a fox, a crow, and a deer. I guess this is a form of extremely perverse sublimation. Gainsborg, fucks, masturbates, and is generally a crazed nymphomaniac throughout the film. Gainsborg takes the very agent of evil that caused her to passively kill her own son, and indulges it. Dafoe displaces his grief into the solace and meaning he derives from care taking.

The woods of course are referred to as Eden-a place where she spent considerable amounts of time with their son.

Gainsborg fears the woods where their cabin is. Recklessly Dafoe decides to treat his wife’s inconsolable grief by exploring her fears with exposure therapy. Sex itself becomes the object of displaced guilt.

The reckless natural abandon that is coitis interrupts their lives most savagely. During that operatic sex scene in the beginning of the film there toddle walks from his crib to witness the primal scene between his parents and then is lulled in child-like wonder out of a wintry open window.

The conflict they have with each other plays out through the grief they suffer in the aftermath of their son’s death. This conflict exists between the two main characters, a husband (Dafoe) who is a therapist, and is wife (Gainsborg) a graduate student with an aborted thesis project. First off there is no real satanic child, but rather a conflict. If we set the horror elements aside, what we get in this film is an ‘art imitating life’ human drama-rife with lots of weird relational pathos. As Zizek likes to say there is the interpretation with the horror element removed, but this discounts some the complexity. I’d say there are two levels at which to “read” the film on.

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