If fainting is any indication of a film's "shock factor", the Cannes festival has experienced far worse than this week's graphic scenes of sexual mutilation from Denmark's master of scandal Lars Von Trier.

A mere four of the 2400 theatre-goers attending Monday's premiere of 'Antichrist' fainted or felt so unwell they walked out, compared to around 20 in 2002 during a real-time rape scene of Monica Bellucci in 'Irreversible' by Gaspard Noe.

Von Trier's thriller on love and madness, littered with graphic close-ups of sex and mutilation, left audiences gasping, squirming and jeering, but there were both cheers and boos from the film crowd at its close.

Willem Dafoe and France's Charlotte Gainsbourg deliver powerful performances in the movie as a couple who retreat to the woods to try to overcome grief at the death of their baby son.

It opens with a slow-motion close-up of sexual penetration, veers into a dramatic escalation of violence, and climaxes with an excruciating shot of Gainsbourg slicing off her clitoris with a pair of scissors.

"This is a very dark dream about guilt and sex and stuff," the 53-year-old director told a rather hostile news conference after the premiere of the often hard-to-watch film, one of 20 competing for the top Palme d'Or award.

AFP