Melancholia

Melancholia (2011) is about a planet colliding with Earth, and its subject is depression. There are two parts. The first is a wedding: Justine falls apart at her own, nobody understands, and the night turns into a disaster. The second is the end of the world: a planet named Melancholia approaches, and this time the capable sister Claire collapses while Justine stays calm. That inversion is the idea. Von Trier took it from an observation: people in depression do not panic in catastrophe, because they were expecting the bad ending anyway. The person who cannot function in ordinary life is the only one who functions at the end of the world. The opening runs close to eight minutes in extreme slow motion and shows the entire ending at the start. So the tension is not about what happens but about how it is met. The overture from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is almost the only music. At Cannes it was Von Trier and not the film that got discussed. The festival declared him persona non grata over the Nazi remarks he made at the press conference. Kirsten Dunst won best actress anyway. The handheld camera shakes constantly and that is deliberately uncomfortable. It runs 135 minutes. Good for: art cinema, apocalypse films, and performance. Less good for: the pace is very heavy, depression is treated directly, and there is no hope in it.