The Danish film director Lars von Trier has been called many things in the course of his controversial career: among them visionary, provocateur, sadist, genius and prankster. But with his latest feature film, the repellent and calculated Antichrist, von Trier has just earned himself another tag: fraud.

This hollow shocker of a movie is a con trick pulled on the more credulous sections of the art-house audience and on the media that bark en masse at von Trier’s goading. And yes, these column inches are as guilty as any other in feeding the director’s seemingly insatiable thirst for attention.

What really rankles is the cold-blooded cynicism of von Trier’s creative decisions and of his desperate need to shock. He has committed to film two of the most horrifying scenes imaginable, secure in the knowledge that his “auteur” status ensures that at least some of the critical community will defend images that would be roundly and rightly condemned if they occurred in the much reviled torture porn horror genre.

But because von Trier’s money shots — an auto-clitorectomy performed with a rusty pair of kitchen scissors and an ejaculation of blood, in case you were wondering — are marooned in a wilfully pretentious narrative, does it make them somehow more acceptable than if they had taken place in a conventional horror flick? The answer must be no.

The usual justification for the inclusion of such controversial moments in a film is that they were essential for the narrative. But in this case it feels rather that the story was created solely in order for von Trier to shoot two of cinema’s most shocking images, and to revel in the resultant notoriety.

And here’s the rub. Von Trier has recently suffered from a debilitating and well-publicised battle with clinical depression. His recovery is continuing. And everyone, whatever their opinion on the latest film, surely wishes him well. But von Trier claims that the film was a form of therapy, that rummaging around in the darkest corners of his psyche and having a bit of a clearout was a step on the long road back to mental health.

But there is something so calculated about this film’s need to cause a reaction that one has to wonder whether it was not, in fact, the creative process that the director found cathartic: rather it was the subsequent attention that provided the real therapy, making the whole repugnant movie a lie. This art-house emperor is completely starkers and the sooner we realise it, the better.

Wendy Ide is a Times film critic

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