Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Director: Lars Von Trier
Stars: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland
****
Lars Von Trier’s last film, Antichrist, charted the sexual psychotic de-evolution of a mother crushed by grief. It was a horror film, full of nightmarish and revolting imagery but also beauty, poignancy and purpose.
His follow-up, Melancholia, is the sci-fi equivalent, yet another of the director’s long list of movies about troubled women, except this time, graphic violence is traded for an aching sadness and visual splendor.
Kristen Dunst does her finest work as a girl whose clinical depression causes self destruction while the titular rogue planet threatens to cause the same annihilation to Earth.
Full of metaphor, allegory, rich performances and dark humour, this is LvT at his most refined and it also offers another brilliant turn from his Antichrist anti-heroine Charlotte Gainsbourg as Dunst’s long suffering sister. A masterpiece.
